dhruv
I’m a researcher and writer interested in politics, history, media, and contemporary affairs. My work focuses on digging into facts, examining narratives, and understanding the ideas and events shaping India and its public discourse.
On 30th March 2026, a day before his own deadline, Union Home Minister Amit Shah told the Lok Sabha that India had become free of Naxalism. Actually, the numbers say a lot; in just 3 years, 4839 Maoists had surrendered, 2218 had been arrested, and 706 had been killed in encounters. Of the CPI (Maoist)’s top leadership, 12 were dead, and 1 was on the run, reportedly negotiating his surrender.
Naxal terrorism in India was a conflict that began in a Bengal village called Naxalbari in 1967. For nearly 60 years, the Left-wing terrorists exploited the poor tribal regions in dense forests and fanned anti-government, anti-development sentiments, isolating dozens of districts from the mainstream cities with armed insurgency and violence inflicted upon the people who had no means to resist them.
This phenomenon is not unique to India either. For Communists, ‘revolution’ is something that has always held a strange fascination. It promises to sweep away everything they sell as ‘unjust’ in a single, heroic moment, and that promise has drawn in idealists, students and intellectuals for more than two centuries. But the story ends almost the same way. The people who dream up the revolution rarely control it, and the people it claims to fight for usually pay for it, which we’ll discuss later in the article.
The chapter of Naxal terrorism in India is closing. Districts where the government once existed only as a name on a map are getting their first schools, hospitals, roads, and mobile towers. The jungle is going quiet. But defeating the armed movement has not ended the idea that fed it. As the guns fell silent in the forests, the talk of revolution grew louder in the cities: in seminar rooms, on college campuses and on social media. It was also mentioned by PM Narendra Modi on 15th August 2026, when he introduced a new term, “Dimagi Naxal”, meaning an intellectual naxalite. The armed naxalism must have ended, but the idea is still alive in the brains of some groups who want destabilisation and anarchy in a country that is finally working to bring economic development to 1.4 billion people.
That’s why, when governments fell in Bangladesh and Nepal, some people in India were thrilled with anticipation: ‘Why not here?’ Those are the people who romanticise the notion of overthrowing an elected government to satisfy the romance in their heads. In this article, we are not only going to talk about those Left wing extremists but also the idea that keeps manifesting around the world again and again, and how the extremism is feature, not bug in far Left ideologies. Revolution, the sudden and violent overthrow of an existing order, has been tried on every continent for more than two centuries. Its promises have been remarkably consistent. So have its results. Then, why does an idea that keeps failing keep coming back?
On 5 August 2024, Sheikh Hasina fled Dhaka as crowds stormed her residence. Just thirteen months later, protesters in Kathmandu set fire to Nepal’s Parliament and the homes of former prime ministers. Both scenes spread instantly across Indian social media, and the Leftists started dreaming. Bangladesh and Nepal may sound like isolated incidents, but South Asia is not alone. The street is restless across the world, and the pattern repeats.
Recently, we have seen pictures of France burning. What began in September 2026 as high-school protests over teacher shortages in the Paris suburbs merged with anger over living costs and a €54 billion budget squeeze. According to France’s Interior Ministry, about 550,000 people marched nationwide. It started as peacefully as most protests do, but masked groups looted hundreds of shops, set fire to the 19th-century town hall in Limoges, and more than 500 police officers, gendarmes and firefighters were injured. At least 1,800 people were arrested. President Macron blamed “insurrectionist elements from radical far-left groups.”
And it is not just France. On the same Saturday,17 October, cost-of-living protests hit Belgium, Italy and Portugal. In Milan, a march against wars and rising prices turned violent as masked protesters threw stones and paving blocks at police, set fire to barricades and looted shops. About 50 people were detained, many of them minors. In Brussels, police used tear gas and water cannons. In Albania, anti-government riots, led by students and a movement demanding Prime Minister Edi Rama’s resignation, went on for five days. According to Newsweek, seven European countries were going through protests in a single week. The same week, however, looked very different in India.
Young boys and girls were celebrating Navratri, dancing in Garba, making reels, but not burning and looting stores. This raises a question: were Indian youth unaware of the wave of unrest, or did they choose a different path? The answer is the latter. Indian youth are not blind to injustice, and they are not silent either. This year, they protested over leaked exam papers; they made a minister resign. But they did it with slogans, sit-ins and satire, not with petrol bombs. They argued with their government; they did not try to burn it down. It was a genuine protest about the real problems faced by the students and their parents. The government tried to address them.
But it didn’t stop there. At the start of October, a new protest emerged, one that tried to portray itself as a continuation of the earlier one. The opposition parties, who have been losing elections for years and blaming the EVMs, draft rolls and SIR, saw this as an opportunity. Joining hands with the Cockroach Janata Party and student groups, they took to the streets over what they claimed was “vote chori,” the allegation that the Election Commission’s revision of voter lists had wiped out genuine voters to help the BJP. Their demand was the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.
But on October 15th, Advocate Prashant Bhushan talked about the real motive behind the protests. He admitted that the protests are not about the flaws in the system but about a change of regime. “There will definitely be a regime change. We all want a regime change. Is there anything wrong with that?”
In a democracy, governments change when they lose elections, and voters decide their fate every five years. “Regime change” belongs to another world: the world of coups, uprisings and foreign interventions, where rulers are removed by force, not by votes. That is how governments fell in Dhaka and Kathmandu, by undemocratic, violent forces, not by votes.
It didn’t stop there. On the same day, 15 October, in a viral video, Far-Left’s Neha Bora was seen thanking Bangladesh’s Gen Z. She said the “Gen-Z movement” of Bangladesh, which resulted in the forceful removal of a democratically elected government in August 2024, was a source of inspiration for the ongoing protests in India. She later tried to claim that the video was ‘doctored’ and that it was not recent but from a Bangladesh-centric event, but the date of the video does not change the fact that she thanked the violent protestors of Bangladesh and called them inspiring for the wide scale arson, loot, vandalism, and murders that eventually culminated with fall of Sheikh Hasina’s government.
The statements of Bhushan and Bora laid bare the real intentions behind the protests, for those who still had any doubt. If we put it together, it reveals a mindset that has little patience for the EVM and no regard for the public mandate. The real goal is not a fairer voter list or a better Election Commission. It is a dream that an elected government can be brought down by enough anger on the streets.
And when that dream is dressed up as a fight for democracy, it becomes even more dangerous, because it uses the language of rights to argue for something that bypasses the people’s vote. The dream is not new to India. Long before Gen Z, reels and Insta trends, a group of communists believed the same thing: that India’s democracy was a sham, that the system could not be reformed, only overthrown, and that the poor would rise with them to do it, despite the fact that the people of India never gave them popular support. They did not wave placards; they picked up guns. Their story began in a small village in Bengal in 1967, and the fate of that movement shows better than anything else where the romance of revolution finally leads.
In May 1967, peasants, tribals and landless labourers in Naxalbari, a village in West Bengal’s Darjeeling district, rose against local landlords and jotedars. They were led by radical CPI(M) leaders Charu Majumdar, Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal. It was started wth arrows, bows and lathis. It was inspired by Mao’s China model. They raided granaries and declared a “protracted people’s war.”
The police crushed the uprising within weeks, but the ideas reached to the whole country. Majumdar was its ideologue. In 1969, he founded the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), and his “Historic Eight Documents” became the foundation of its violent campaign. He argued that India was a “semi-feudal, semi-colonial” state run by a “bourgeois-landlord” class, that elections were a sham, and, echoing Mao, that power would grow “out of the barrel of a gun.”
In 1972, Charu Majumdar died; the movement broke into rival groups including the People’s War Group and the Maoist Communist Centre. In 2004, these two joined to form the CPI(Maoist). Over time, their methods became more brutal. They forced contractors and businesses to pay them money, planted landmines, brutalised people, and killed anyone they suspected of helping the police.
The 2000s era shows a story of how they were pretending to fight for the rights of poor people by killing more innocent people. In practice, “people’s war” looks like this: In April 2010, Chintalnar(Dantewada), Maoists attacked a CRPF company resting after an all-night patrol. This attack killed around 76 security personnel. It was among the deadliest attacks on Indian forces. Just after one month, in May 2010, Maoists derailed the Jnaneswari Express in West Bengal, causing the death of 148 people. Moreover, in May 2013, in Jhiram Ghati, Naxalites attacked a Congress convoy in Chhattisgarh; about 27 people were killed, including the state chief Nand Kumar Patel and Mahendra Karma. In 2011, Maoists kidnapped the Malkangiri district collector, R. Vineel Krishna, and freed him only after the release of jailed cadres.
In 2006, PM Manmohan Singh called Naxalism the “single biggest internal security challenge” India had ever faced. Since 2000, it has cost more than 12,000 lives, including over 4000 civilians and 2,723 security personnel. The Maoists claimed to fight for the poor people like tribals and landless labourers, but they ended up killing the very people they claimed to fight for.
Not just killing they were restricting them from growing; they were becoming a wall between the government schemes and the people. But in 2014, the government changed. Narendra Modi became the Prime Minister of India; not only the government, but the strategies to tackle the Naxalites also changed. While the previous government was using the soft approach by trying to engage with them, but Modi Government decided to put a full stop to the violence. ‘Surrender or die’ was the message sent while police and CAPF were tasked with hunting the Left wing terrorists down. Speaking in the Indian Parliament in March 2026, Amit Shah said the “Red Corridor” at its peak stretched across parts of 12 states, was gone, decimated.
No place demonstrates the story better than Abujhmarh,in Narayanpur, Chhattisgarh. It was the region that became the Maoists’ unofficial headquarters. It was spread over 4000 square kilometres, larger than Goa. It never had a revenue map; its villagers, mostly belonging to the Abujhmaria tribe, a particularly vulnerable tribal group, still hold no title deed to the land they farm. Basically, these Maoists were running a parallel government there, named ” Janatana Sarkar.” They burnt more than 50 schools, destroyed roads, and set buses ablaze if they entered the villages. In 2023, Abujhmarh got its first operation theatre and two new mobile towers. That same year, Ramji Dodi, a former sarpanch of Zara village, was abducted from its village and strangled to death, branded as a “police mukhbir.”
The movement’s structure tells its own story. Its leaders were educated men from towns and cities. For example, Basavaraju was the general secretary of the CPI(Maoist), who was killed in Abujhmarh on 21st May 2025. He was 70, carried a bounty of Rs 1.5 crore and was behind both the Chintalnar massacre and the Jhiram Ghati attack. He held an engineering degree. In 2004, a party document called Urban Perspective laid out plans to recruit students and intellectuals through front organisations. Meanwhile, tribal youth from the forests were the foot soldiers.
A French philosopher and sociologist, Raymond Aron, had noticed the same pattern decades earlier. In his book, The Opium of the Intellectuals, he wrote, “The so-called proletarian party in the countries where it has seized power has had ‘peasants rather than factory workers as its troops, and intellectuals, exasperated by the traditional hierarchy or by national humiliation, as its leaders.”
In simple words, the revolution was planned by educated people in cities and fought by poor people in villages. The Naxal movement followed the same script: its leaders came from colleges and towns, while its foot soldiers were tribal youth from the forests, used as cannon fodder.
India is not alone; Peru’s Shining Path, a Maoist insurgency founded by a philosophy professor, Abimael Guzmán, waged war from 1980 to 2000. Peru’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission estimated that the conflict killed 69,000 people. Most of them were poor peasants, the very people the Shining Path claimed to liberate.
Nearly six decades after Naxalbari, the balance sheet is stark. The movement redistributed no land, overthrew no government, and built no lasting institution. Ironically, it ruined the lives of local people by cutting them off from their basic needs. It made it dangerous to get roads, schools and hospitals. However, the number of Naxal-affected districts fell from 106 in 2015 to just a handful by 2025, wiped out by 2026 . Development reached Abujhmarh not through the revolution, but after it.
And that’s what a Leftist needs to understand: change is slow. Change comes from reform, not from revolution. Peacefully fighting for people’s rights and needs takes years, but it changes lives. Tearing down the existing system does not. Yet a leftist is always fascinated by the idea of destroying the system. We will come to this fetish of the Left in a later section. Before that, we need to talk about how this Naxalism-type system was not only an exception, but it was a part of a larger cult known globally as Marxism. It is a socio-economic and political philosophy founded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that views the world as a history of class struggle between the wealthy owners and the exploited workers. It always acts as a cocaine for its intellectual followers who are convinced that they will definitely change the world by putting communism at its centre. That’s why the idea of revolution became more important.
Fun Fact: these followers tried to bring revolution to their own countries, and each time they failed. In the next section, we will look at these revolutions and what they left behind.
If Naxalbari were an exception, it could be blamed on Indian conditions, but unfortunately it is not. Two centuries of revolutions on four continents show a consistent pattern.
Aron stated it as a rule: “Proletarian revolutions, like all the revolutions of the past, merely entail the violent replacement of one élite by another.”
In other words, the communist revolution was no different from any other. Communists say they will end the ruling class forever and hand power to the workers. But according to Aron, that’s not what happens. As in every revolution, power simply passes by force from one ruling group to another. The old kings and landlords were replaced by party bosses and commanders. The real problem never got solved, and the poor stayed at the bottom, while also bearing the worst of the violence and exploitation. Let’s go through these revolutions one by one to see what they did to their countries.
The French revolution is also known as the mother of modern revolutions. It began with a crowd storming the Bastille, a royal prison in Paris and a grand declaration of the rights of man. On the surface level, it looks like a fight for liberty, equality and brotherhood but that wasn't the reality. It began with these promises but within five years, the revolutionaries had turned on each other. Several groups fought for control and sent their rivals to the guillotine: those who wanted to keep a king with limited powers, the moderate Girondins and the radical Jacobins.
We often hear the French revolution as it was a united fight of left against the king but this statement is false. The left wasn't united at all. During the Reign of terror, the violent period of the French revolution, thousands were executed, many on mere suspicion of being the enemies of the revolution. Even Robespierre, the Jacobin leader who ran the terror rule, was himself guillotined in 1794.
As Aron wrote, “The men who conceive them are not those who carry them out. Those who begin them rarely live to see their end, except in exile or in prison.” The chaos ended when a strongman stepped in. Napoleon Bonaparte, an army general, seized power in 1799 and crowned himself emperor in 1804.
In Aron’s words, the rival left-wing groups had “fought each other relentlessly only to give way in the end to a crowned military dictator.” A revolution fought to get rid of a king ended with an emperor. The simple truth is that many revolutions like this ended with an emperor or a dictator. But why does it happen? We will answer that in “Why they keep chasing it”. Was France the only country that went through this? No. There are many others, and Russia is one of them.
Russia matters because it is where communism first moved from books to real power. Before 1917, Marx’s ideas were only theories debated in cafes and lecture halls. Then, Lenin and the Bolsheviks became the first to seize power in Marx’s name and try to build the “workers’ paradise” he had promised. Every communist revolution that followed, in China, Cambodia, Cuba and even the jungles of Bastar, looked to Russia as its model. So it is worth seeing what happened there.
In 1917, Russia was tired of war, hunger and a weak Tsar, the title used by Russia’s emperors from 1547 until the monarchy was abolished in 1917. When the Tsar fell, a small, disciplined party called the Bolsheviks, led by Vladimir Lenin, seized power in October that year. Their slogan was simple and powerful: “Peace, Land and Bread.” Those 3 words stirred people. The poor were promised that the land would belong to the peasants and the factories to the workers.
So, did it brought every promised right to the poor? Nope, what followed was the opposite. Russia slid into a brutal civil war (1918-1921). Millions died because of hunger, fighting and disease. To win it, the new government created a secret police to hunt down its enemies and opposition parties. Newspapers were shut down. The party that once fought against the Tsar turned out to be the one jailing its opponents. Every promise was reversed. The peasants who had been promised land soon saw it taken away. From the late 1920s, under Joseph Stalin, private farms were forced into giant state-run collective farms. Farmers who resisted were labelled enemies, and many were deported or shot.
The result was a man-made disaster. In the famine of 1932-33, demographers estimate that nearly 3.9million Ukrainians starved to death, a catastrophe caused by what one researcher calls the “cruel political decisions” of the central authorities. Then came the “Great Terror” of the late 1930s. It was a brutal campaign started by dictator Joseph Stalin to eliminate its political rivals, military leaders and ordinary citizens suspected of disloyalty. Around 700,000 people were executed, and millions were sent to the Gulag, forced labour camps. Many of them were the loyal Communists falsely accused of treason. A revolution for freedom ended up putting a dictator in power, just as in France.
The revolution also destroyed its own makers. Leon Trotsky, who had helped the revolution, was exiled by Stalin and murdered in Mexico in 1940. Most of them were Lenin’s original comrades who were killed in Stalin’s purges. Meanwhile, a new ruling class of party officials with special shops, better homes and holiday villas replaced the old nobility. Ordinary people suffered, queuing for bread.
The Soviet Union lasted about seventy years. When it collapsed in 1991, it left behind a broken economy and fifteen separate countries. The revolution that promised peace, land, and bread delivered war, hunger, and fear.
So far, we have talked about France and Russia. But the same dream soon travelled east. In 1949, after years of civil war, Mao Zedong’s Communists took control of China. Mao had learned from Lenin, and he wanted to go further and faster. Russia took decades to industrialise; he believed China could do it in a few years.
In 1958, Mao Zedong launched the “Great Leap Forward.” His goal was for China to overtake Britain’s steel production within fifteen years. It wasn’t easy. Farmers were forced to give up their own land and live and work together in large communes. They even melted their cooking pots and farm tools in small homemade furnaces to make steel. But the problem was that most of the steel was useless, and the fields were left untended. It resulted in the worst famines in history. Between 1959 and 1961, experts estimate that somewhere between 15 million and 45 million people died.
A few years later came another disaster, the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). Schools and colleges were shut down. Mao mobilised millions of high school and university students into radical paramilitary groups known as the Red Guards. These teenage “Red Guards” attacked teachers, writers and anyone seen as the enemy of the revolution. Even top party leaders were thrown out. One of them was Deng Xiaoping, who was sent to work in a tractor repair facility. China began to grow only after 1978, when the same Deng, who was thrown out, came in charge. He quietly gave up the revolution’s economic ideas. He let the farmers sell their own crops, allowed people to start businesses, and opened China to trade with the world.
Both countries once dreamed of a revolution, and both paid a terrible price for it. In Russia and China, the promise was almost the same: an end to landlords and masters, land for the peasants and power for the workers. These ideas look amazing in theory, because one trait of communists is that they want everything to be ideal: the world, the country, the city. But the problem is that they never tell you “how.” Take “end the landlords’ dominance and give power to the workers”. It sounds perfect, because everyone should have equal rights and power. But ask them how they will actually achieve it, and either they have no answer, or they call for a revolution. But why? Why are communists such die-hard fans of revolution? The answer lies in the mentality of the average leftist, which we will discuss in “Why they keep chasing it”.
Back to Russia and China. Both tried to reach their goals through a violent revolution. The result was the same: famine, purges, prison camps and a new ruling class of party officials who lived far better than the people they claimed to serve. But their endings were different, and the difference is telling. The Soviet Union clung to its revolutionary economics until the very end, and in 1991 it collapsed. But China chose another path and rectified its course. China’s spectacular rise came only after the changes brought by Deng Xiaoping. Millions of people climbed out of poverty, not because of the revolution but by stepping away at the right time.
If we are talking about revolutions, then how can we possibly leave out Iran? Iran shows something even stranger: a revolution can be hijacked by the people its supporters least expected.
In the 1970s, Iran was ruled by a monarch, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. He ruled with an iron hand. His secret police jailed and tortured critics, and many Iranians saw him as a puppet of the West. Especially after the CIA-backed coup of 1953 that had removed the elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh. By 1978, millions had turned against him. The movement included different groups, but it was led by the extremists Islamist with the support of hardcore leftists. That’s the sad reality: in the name of revolution, the leftists can support anyone, even the extremist Islamists.
For many leftists, the religious leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini seemed like a useful ally, someone who could mobilise the masses against Western influence. Khomeini understood this well. While living near Paris, he spoke the language they wanted to hear: democracy, freedom and independence. He even suggested that clerics would not run the government. Many believed him. So did some famous Western thinkers. The French philosopher Michel Foucault visited Iran in 1978 and wrote glowing reports, praising its “political spirituality.” It was a perfect example of intellectuals falling in love with a revolution they barely understood.
In January 1979, the Shah fled, and in February Khomeini returned to cheering crowds. For a brief moment, it looked as if Iran might become a democracy. But within months, the clerics took full control. Revolutionary courts were set up, universities were closed, independent political parties were banned, and women were forced into Islamic dress codes. What began as a revolution of many groups ended up bringing a theocracy.
Then the new regime turned on its own allies. Between June 1981 and March 1982, thousands of political opponents were executed, including communists, socialists, liberals and nationalists, many of whom had helped bring down the Shah. Trials often lasted minutes, with no lawyers, and people were sentenced to death for “waging war against God.” The Tudeh Party, which had supported the Islamic Republic in its early years, was banned, and thousands of its members were arrested, tortured or killed. In 1988, the regime executed thousands more political prisoners, many of them leftists. The Marxists who believed religion was the “opium of the people” had helped bring Islamic clerics to power in Iran, and became the first ones to be wiped out.
Even after all this, the story is not over. Since December 2025, Iranians have again poured onto the streets, angry about soaring prices and a collapsing currency, and many now demand an end to the Islamic Republic itself. The regime has answered with bullets; the group Iran Human Rights says at least 3,428 protesters have been killed. Then, in February 2026, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei was killed in US-Israeli strikes, and within a week, Iran’s clerics named his son, Mojtaba Khamenei, as the new supreme leader.
The irony is hard to miss. A revolution launched in 1979 to overthrow a hereditary king has ended up, forty-seven years later, with power passing from father to son. As Aron would put it, one élite had simply replaced another.
The story repeats wherever revolution has been tried. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge emptied the cities in 1975 to build a “pure” farming society. In under four years, around 2 million people died from execution, hunger and forced labour. Castro’s 1959 revolution in Cuba did improve literacy and healthcare, but sixty-seven years later, the economic condition is dire, blackouts have plunged the whole island into darkness again and again.
Even infant mortality, once the revolution’s proudest record, is rising. In Nicaragua, around 1979, Daniel Ortega helped to overthrow a dictator, only to become one himself. Not only that, he scrapped the term limits, saw 355 people killed when protests broke out in 2018, and in 2023 stripped about 300 critics of their citizenship. In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez’s “Bolivarian Revolution” turned one of Latin America’s richest oil nations into a wreck. The economy shrank by more than half, and more than 7.7 million people fled the country before his successor, Nicolás Maduro, was captured by American forces in January 2026.
The lesson is hard to miss. Revolution was good at destroying the old order and terrible at building a better one. So is revolution only good at destroying? Actually, the answer is not that simple.
Guglielmo Ferrero, an Italian historian and journalist, distinguished between two revolutions: the constructive revolution and the destructive revolution. A constructive revolution aims to extend the franchise and establish certain liberties; meanwhile, the destructive revolution is “brought about by the collapse of one principle of legitimacy and the absence of a new legitimacy to replace it.”
In simple terms, the first revolution builds: it gives people the vote, rights and freedoms. The second one breaks: when the old authority collapses and some unexpected force takes its place. The result is chaos, terror, and, sooner or later, a dictator.
Aron found the distinction “satisfying to the mind”, but he went a step further that the good things we credit to the French Revolution such as representative government, equality and personal freedom, did not actually need the guillotine. He wrote, “one might well imagine,” “the monarchy itself gradually introducing the essentials of what appears to us, looking back, to have been the Revolution’s achievement.”
That raises the real question. If the constructive revolution can happen without the destructive one, why pay the price of blood at all? We will answer that in the next section.
The strongest argument against the Leftist idea of ‘revolution’ is not the number of people it kills. It is the fact that other countries took another, slower road, one that brought the same results, or better, without the bloodbath. At the start of his book, “the opium of the Intellectuals “, Aron notes that the French Revolution spread big ideas across Europe: that the people should rule, that a constitution should limit power, that parliaments should be elected, and that everyone should have equal rights.
“But look at England. It achieved all of these sometimes even sooner than in France, without any need for the people to rise, with a Promethean gesture, and shake off their chains”, he argued that English democracy was the result of joint achievement of rival parties. It was built slowly, step by step, by improving the institutions that already existed. The same pattern continued in the 1800s. France had many more revolutions than Britain, yet its economy grew more slowly. Frequent upheavals did not change society faster. They simply kept knocking down the institutions an economy needs to grow. The United States, meanwhile, kept the same constitution for nearly two hundred years, and, in Aron’s words, “a federation of agrarian States has become the greatest industrial power in the world without any recourse to illegality.” For Aron, constitutional instability is “a sign of sickness rather than of health.”
France itself found lasting freedom only when it stopped having revolutions. Under the Third Republic, Aron writes, “universal suffrage encouraged the safeguarding of liberties and not the accession of a tyrant.” In other words, voting finally protected people’s freedom instead of handing power to a dictator. For the first time since 1789, the rival groups had no reason to kill each other, because everything they had fought for was finally achieved through a stable system.
India took the same road as Britain and the United States. From its very first election, the Constitution gave every adult the right to vote, something Britain and France granted only after generations of struggle. The Zamindari system was abolished by passing laws but not by shooting the landlords. The Green Revolution ended the famines that once haunted the country, and the reforms of 1991 got a stagnant economy moving.
Each of these took years, but not a single government had to be overthrown with violence, and none of it led to the kind of dictatorship that followed communist revolutions. Even the dark period of the Emergency of 1975–77, the closest India came to authoritarian rule, ended with the ballot box: Indira Gandhi called an election and lost it.
For India, the obsession with overthrowing a government is not an abstract idea. Its own neighbourhood offers three stark cases of what such upheavals actually do to a country. Each tells the same story at a different speed. Let’s start with Bangladesh.
In July 2024, students took to the streets against a quota system in government jobs. It began as a student protest with a few demands but turned out to be violent. Then PM Sheikh Hasina responded with force. According to the report, around 1400 people may have been killed between 1 July and 15 August. Most of them were shot by the security forces. On 5th August 2024, Hasina fled to India as a violent mob was preparing to storm her residence.
The brutality of the crackdown was real. But the day after the fall brought its own violence. The UN report cited revenge attacks on members of the ousted Awami League and attacks on minorities. There were also reports of Hindu teachers being forced from their posts. As so often happens after a revolution, those with the least protection the poor and the minorities, including Hindus, were the most exposed.
An interim government under Muhammad Yunus took charge of the country, whose institutions had been hollowed out by years of one-party dominance. In the end, the revolution simply brought the other party to power. In February 2026, Bangladesh finally voted, and the Awami League was banned from the ballot. The Bangladesh Nationalist Party won a landslide, and Tarique Rahman became prime minister. The Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami emerged as the main opposition with 68 seats. The student-led National Citizen Party, born from the uprising itself, won just six. Sheikh Hasina remains in exile in India.
For ordinary people, the highest cost has been uncertainty. Two years of turmoil have brought the economy to its knees, prices have gone up, and businesses have suffered. The country’s biggest old party is now banned, and politics is divided between old rivals and an Islamist opposition. Bangladesh only swapped one kind of instability for another, and paid for with blood and loss.
Nepal is no stranger to revolution. In 1996, Nepal’s Maoists launched a “People’s war” that lasted for a decade and cost more than 13,000 lives. In 2006, they laid down their arms, and in 2008, their leader Pushpa Kamal Dahal, ‘Prachanda’, became prime minister. The revolutionaries had become the establishment, and over the next seventeen years they took their turn in the rotating coalitions of a political class increasingly seen as corrupt and self-serving.
In September 2025, after the government banned 26 social media platforms, young Nepalis went on the streets and rose against the entire political class. On 9th September, protesters set fire to Parliament and the homes of several former prime ministers, and more than 75 people were killed in the unrest. Within days, the country had an interim prime minister, Sushila Karki, chosen partly through an online poll. Six months later, in March 2026, Nepalis voted in a Young party, the Rastriya Swatantra Party, which won 182 of 275 seats, and its leader, Balen Shah, a former rapper and mayor of Kathmandu, became the Prime Minister. Prachanda’s former Maoists, who once promised a revolution, won just 17 seats.
Sri Lanka’s story runs the other way. The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), a Marxist party, tried twice to seize power by force, in 1971 and again in 1987–89. Both insurrections were crushed at a terrible cost in lives. The second alone left an estimated 35,000 to 60,000 people dead, many of them young men from poor rural families, the very people the JVP claimed to fight for.
Then, in 2022, Sri Lanka faced its worst crisis since independence. On 12 April, the country defaulted on $51 billion of foreign debt. Fuel, food and medicine ran out. Months of protests, known as the Aragalaya (“the struggle”), followed, and on 9 July crowds stormed the President’s House, forcing President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee and resign. It looked like Dhaka and Kathmandu. But what came next was different. The constitution held: Parliament chose a successor, the economy was slowly stabilised, and the anger on the streets was settled two years later at the polling booth.
In 2024, the same movement that had once picked up guns, now leading the National People’s Power alliance, won Sri Lanka’s presidency, and then 159 of 225 seats in Parliament. Anura Kumara Dissanayake became president not by storming a palace but by winning votes. What two armed uprisings could not achieve, the ballot box delivered.
Taken together, the neighbourhood offers a lesson the cheerleaders of “takhta palat” rarely draw. Overthrow is quick and dramatic; what follows is slow, uncertain and often violent. The revolutionaries of one decade become the establishment of the next and the target of the decade after. Prachanda’s Maoists went from the jungle to the prime minister’s chair to just 17 seats. Bangladesh’s students toppled a government and won just six. Iran let a theocracy grab power and is still paying a heavy price for it.
So far, we have seen how armed Naxalism is giving way to “dimagi Naxalism”, where the idea, rather than the gun, spreads through educational institutions and civil society. We have also seen how destructive Leftist revolutions have wrecked countries around the world. In this section, we finally ask what fascinates these leftists about revolution, and why they keep chasing it even after it has failed so many times.
The problem with the Left is that it lives in an imaginary world. If you don’t believe this statement, just go and talk to a hardcore Leftist or a Communist. You will hear, at great length, how everything about the world is wrong. But ask how things will actually change, and you will realise they don’t have any real answer. Basically, their diagnosis is detailed, but the cure is vague. “How” is the simplest word to expose them.
But the question is still there: What is it about the idea of ‘revolution’ that draws Communists like moths to flame? The answer lies in the revolution itself, and how they see it. For them, the existing system is so rotten and so close to collapse that it cannot be repaired, only overthrown. The root cause of each problem is the existing system. And the solution is: Bring it down, and the bad people will fall, and the good people will rise. In theory, it looks amazing and appealing, but in the practical world, it has repeatedly ruined countries, and unleashed suffering on the masses, because the goal of revolution is to bring down the old power, not to help the country grow. It is a mindset built around destroying institutions, not improving them.
For its believers, ‘revolution’ is not a policy to be judged by its results. It is a faith. Raymond Aron saw this clearly. Karl Marx had called religion “the opium of the people”, something that comforts people and dulls their pain. Aron’s book “The Opium of the Intellectuals” mentioned that. “In Marxist eschatology,” he wrote, “the proletariat is cast in the role of collective saviour.” Leftists, ironically, believe in the idea with the same clarity and zeal of religious fanatics. The ideology has a holy book, priests in the form of the Party, a select group of people, a judgment day called the ‘revolution’, and a heaven waiting on the other side. The irony is that many of these believers are among the most educated people in the society. But education can turn into arrogance: the belief that “we are the ones who will change everything.”
Revolution gives them something real life cannot: certainty. As Aron wrote, “The intellectual who no longer feels attached to anything is not satisfied with opinions merely; he wants certainty, he wants a system. The Revolution provides him with his opium.”
It also gives them an escape. “The myth of the Revolution serves as a refuge for utopian intellectuals,” he added. Every real government falls short of perfect equality or freedom. Only a Revolution that hasn’t happened yet can stay perfect, because it has never been tested.
But the intellectuals cannot bring about the revolution they hope for alone;,they need soldiers. For these communists, they see revolution as a mission, and to carry out that mission, they recruit the easiest people in society: the poor people. They are told that the whole system is against them, that no one will help them and that the only way out is to tear it all down. They are promised that one day power will be in their hands. And for one day, you have to fight, have to join the struggle. The Result is obvious: the poor suffer the most. They are the front line, and when the fighting starts, they are first to die. But what happens when the existing system is thrown out?
A revolution destroys the existing order; it creates a vacuum of power, and that vacuum is filled by the strongest group left. A revolution launched in the name of freedom and equality ends in dictatorship. And when the revolution fails, the blame always falls elsewhere: on a leader who betrayed the cause, on enemies who sabotaged it, on whoever happens to be in power. It is very hard for a leftist to accept that the idea itself might be wrong. Their belief that they are the smartest people in the room, that they alone know how a country should be run, leads to failures they never admit. Aron saw this in the French who had lived through the upheaval of 1944. They looked back fondly at their lost dream and could not bring themselves to criticise it. For them, “the ‘others’, the men at the top, or the Soviet Union, or the United States of America, are responsible for the deception.”
So, after failing again and again, one would expect that they might stop chasing it. But no, they never do. They keep chasing it. Because reforms are slow and slowness bores them. Reform can take years to change a single thing, but if we look at revolution, it offers a grand dream: after just one decisive moment, everyone will be equal, everyone will be free, everyone will get a fair share of the economy.
Aron captured this perfectly. “To the intellectual who turns to politics for the sake of diversion,” he wrote, “reform is boring and revolution exciting. The one is prosaic, the other poetic.” This utopian dream convinces believers that their view alone is right for the nation, and that every other view is dragging the country down.
Aron’s most disturbing point is about violence. “Violence itself attracts and fascinates more than it repels,” he wrote. European, especially French, Leftists admired Russia’s bloody revolution far more than the peaceful socialism of Britain or Scandinavia, despite the civil war, the forced collectivisation and the great purges. “Or should one say because of?” Aron asked. “For it sometimes seems as if the price of the revolution were placed on the credit rather than on the debit side of the balance sheet.” In simple words, the bloodshed was not seen as a cost. It was seen as proof that the revolution was serious.
Aron even compared it to addiction. Those who have dreamed of revolution, he wrote, “find it hard to accustom themselves to the loss of their hope.” When they lose faith, they turn cynical, but that is only withdrawal, not a cure. “The addict is cured only on the day when he is capable of faith without illusion.” The high is the moment the old government falls. The crash is everything that comes after. And the craving returns every time a new crowd appears on a new screen.
Marxism and its followers leave little room for criticism. Criticise them, and they will blame their failures on someone else. Above all, they reduce a complicated world into a simple template of black and white: government versus people, rich versus poor, Left versus Right, oppressor versus oppressed. It is a convenient template, but it misses all the nuance.
Let’s be fair. Revolution itself is not always wrong. History has many examples where it was the only option left. The question is not “Is revolution good or bad?” The real question is: when, and against whom?
If we look at the world before democracy, for most of history, countries were ruled by kings, emperors and colonial masters. At that time, people had no vote, no elections and no way to remove a king peacefully. A king used to rule until his death, and then his son took over. In such a world, if people wanted change, rising against the king was the only option. In 1776, American colonists had no vote in the British Parliament that taxed them. We Indians under British rule had limited rights at the mercy of the colonial masters, despite footing the bill for the empires expenses. When there is no peaceful way to change those in power, revolt can become a necessity.
Aron understood this. He did not condemn every revolution. He explained that violent revolution happens when “negotiation and compromise have failed to resolve.” In other words, “the failure of democratic procedures.” That is exactly the point. Revolution belongs to a world where democratic procedures do not exist or have completely broken down.
But if we talk about India specifically, every adult has a vote. Governments are changed regularly at the EVMs; previously, it was the ballot box. India has seen power change hands between rival parties many times since independence. If you don’t like a government, you can campaign against it, protest against it, take it to court, write against it and vote it out, which means we have all the options that our ancestors never had.
This is where the romance becomes dangerous. Romanticising violent revolution in a democracy means wanting to use an old-world weapon against a new-world system. It means treating voters as if their choice does not count. And that’s what opposition parties have wanted to do for the last few years in India. The first campaign was started against EVMs, but it could never gain legitimacy, no proof was ever offered. Then it moved to the electoral rolls in November 2025, and now SIR is the target. The word “Regime change” is part of the process. To bring about that revolution, the Leftist opposition is trying to build a perspective in the minds of voters that they need to change the regime, as if it wasn’t the voters that chose the government, but some ancient monarchy that asserted power.
As Aron put it, “Revolution and democracy are contradictory notions.” You cannot claim to defend democracy while dreaming of overthrowing the government that democracy produced.
So the problem is not revolution as a historical event. Our own freedom struggle was a revolution against foreign rule, and we rightly honour it. The problem is the romanticisation, the almost fanatical chasing of an unrealistic high, the habit of treating revolution as a beautiful dream, a shortcut, a thrill, even when the peaceful road is open. Revolution was once a last resort against kings. Today, some want to make it a first choice against voters.
Finally, to where this story began. For nearly sixty years, the forests of central India were the laboratory of an Indian ‘revolution’, one that failed miserably but left a lot of bodies in its wake. The experiment had everything its theorists wanted: a genuine grievance, a dispossessed people, a communist party and a doctrine that promised liberation, which they never gave. What it produced was fear, murder, landmines and anarchy.
Now the gunfire has faded, and the things the revolution blocked are arriving: roads that ambulances can use, phone towers that let a farmer check a price, schools that stay open. None of it is glamorous. All of it is the slow, prosaic work Aron said intellectuals find so boring. It is also the only work that has ever changed the lives of the poor at scale and lifted communities out of poverty.
This is what Aron meant when he called revolution and democracy “contradictory notions”. A revolution is power seized by a minority in defiance of the law, at the point where persuasion and compromise have been abandoned. However noble its slogans, it cannot even respect the choices of the people it claims to represent. That is why India’s democracy, for all its frustrations, is not an obstacle to be bypassed but the only road that delivers solutions, the very road the Leftists refuse to take.
The romance of overthrow will not disappear. It returns with every crowd on every screen, and it will find new believers among the social elite who enthral themselves to the failed ideology of Marx.
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