With the contradictions of the Indian neoliberal experiment more stark than ever and the two main political alliances wedded to yet further marketisation, it would be reasonable to assume that the country’s mainstream communist parties would be well placed to benefit.

Yet the recent history of the left doesn’t augur well for April’s parliamentary elections.

In 2009 the Left Front, an alliance of communist and socialist groups, saw its number of deputies in the 545-seat Lok Sabha squeezed from 59 to just 24, the lion’s share of which are held by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI(M).

From supporting the 2004 Congress Party government of Manmohan Singh on key economic and social legislation, albeit outside the government, the Left Front’s depleted parliamentary representation has been able to achieve little.

Since then, the CPI(M) and its allies have suffered reverses at state level, including a close-run loss in Kerala and a more devastating one in West Bengal.

The Kerala setback reflects the regular see-sawing of political control between the Left Front and Congress, but the defeat in West Bengal ended over three decades of communist domination.

The CPI(M) and its allies have undergone much internal soul-searching as to why they lost significant tranches of rural Bengali support.

Some commentators ascribe this to an overly draconian approach to industrialising the state.

One particular case, that of the proposed petroleum hub at Nandigram, led to an armed conflict between protesters, backed by the then opposition and law enforcement agencies.

A recently police report largely exonerated the latter, suggesting that the greatest failure of the Left was to lose the communications battle from the very outset.

What has happened since — the increasingly oppressive attacks on the CPI(M) by the Trinamool Congress Party — raises concerns as to whether the parliamentary elections in the state will be fair and free.

At the same time, some of the CPI(M)’s allies have buckled and defected to the ruling party in the state assembly in a rush for jobs and influence.

In the latest All India Tracker poll, national support for the CPI(M) stood at just 3.4 per cent and that for its various leftist allies even lower.

Yet the CPI(M)’s analysis of the current situation and its tactical responses suggest a more optimistic outcome, but one that may also have longer-term contradictory ramifications.

CPI(M) general secretary Prakash Karat has asserted that “it’s a fact that in the last Lok Sabha elections we suffered a setback. I don’t see any factors or circumstances that lead us to believe that the Left will do worse than the last election.”

Regarding the opinion polls, it is clear that the CPI(M) and its allies really need to be viewed less as national rather as regional players.

There are now few electoral prospects for the party outside of West Bengal, Kerala and the tiny state of Tripura.

The key response of the Left, therefore, has been to work with other regional parties to build up a third front against both the ruling Congress-coalition and its right-wing BJP alternative.

According to a Wall Street Journal report from early February, an 11-party agreement — including the CPI(M) — has been hammered out to co-ordinate voting among the 92 deputes in the current Lok Sabha.

In the report Sitaram Yechury, the CPI(M)’s parliamentary group leader said “a joint programme will be launched later on campaigning together in the general election.”

Such an effort at leveraging a secular aggregate bloc of deputies is not without precedent as both the 1989 and 1996 general elections saw such rainbow coalitions come to power. However, neither of those governments lasted for a full five-year term.

Indeed, such a move now is already presenting the participants with considerable challenges and tensions. Any pre-election pact means the CPI(M) and other leftist parties having to work with some pretty odd bedfellows, including possibly the likes of flamboyant multimillionaire and ex-movie star Jayalalithaa in Tamil Nadu.

Even if any future coalition is elected, there is the not insubstantial task of agreeing a coherent and progressive post-election programme.

Yechury has said that the future programme of the regional parties will contain issues related to the livelihood of the people, upholding federalism and combating corruption, but with no specific commitments to date.

Of even greater significance to the party and its allies is the need for it to renew its strength in the ongoing class struggle outside of elections.

For many years, there have been accusations that the party is atrophying, its leadership ageing, its youth wings declining and the quality of cadres in serious long-term decline.

The response of the CPI(M) has been the 2010 launch of its Rectification Campaign, aimed at honestly analysing these deficiencies and systematically addressing them.

The opening report accepted that there had been a failure to provide ideological-political training, both among new members and the older members who needed to be consistently re-educated. This had resulted in a low level of political consciousness.

Efforts have been made to improve political education and organisation and some of the long-serving senior elected members have stepped down or not sought re-election.

The party has also acknowledged that it needs to do more to attract younger voters.

As Karat has noted, “the issues that our party takes up and the platform through which we address the concerns of the vast masses of young people in India — questions of education, employment — these are the things that matter to large numbers of youngsters.”

Yet the same report also identified that it is the very tactics that the party is once again entering into with “bourgeois parties, particularly electoral alliances, (that) have led to the … penetration of the bourgeois style of functioning within the party. The use of money power and other bourgeois practices by these parties act as a corroding influence on our cadres.”

So the 2014 Lok Sabha elections will present a major challenge for the CPI(M) and the Indian left in general to pull off both a reasonable result but one which doesn’t undermine the long-term internal reforms needed to guarantee a strong anti-capitalist and revolutionary presence in the longer term.