Opinion | The Left’s Influence Over Indian Institutions
The permeation of colleges, bureaucracy, the judiciary and the government by the Indian Left is a narrative of ideological victory and, more and more, overreaching
By every standard, India’s institutional terrain across academics, bureaucracy, judiciary and executive clearly matches Left-wing philosophy. The result of a decades-long process in which the Indian Left, underpinned by its intellectual affinity with the Soviet Union and political alliance with the Indian National Congress, passes a socialist thread through the fabric of the nation in India. The result is a set of establishments indifferent to public opinion, Westernised in their point of view, and against the Hindu ethos that has historically shaped India’s cultural identity.
To appreciate the hold the Left exerts on institutions in India, one has to go back to the middle of the 20th century when the Soviet Union became a north star for anti-colonial activity around the world. Freshly independent in 1947, India was no exception. Originally founded in 1925, the Communist Party of India (CPI) struck a chord with politicians and thinkers vexed with colonial capitalism. Although the CPI never achieved political dominance, its intellectual influence increased in part thanks to a symbiotic cooperation with the Indian National Congress, particularly under Jawaharlal Nehru’s guidance. Socialist Nehru valued the Soviet scheme of central planning and state-led development, a vision that came to be seen in India’s Five-Year Plans and the establishment of a massive state sector.
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This fit was not merely rhetorical. As noted in India After Gandhi (2007) by historian Ramachandra Guha, Nehru’s administration welcomed Soviet consultants and technical knowledge, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, creating an intellectual environment in which socialism was identified with progress. Though the Congress had a wide spectrum, it relied heavily on this framework, embedding a statist, redistributionist ethic into the policy-making and administrative system. This provided the foundation for what critics refer to as a “Leftist ecosystem", a network of academics, officials, and judges who considered themselves as protectors of a secular, socialist India, contrary to its conventional moorings.
Though founded in 1961, the NCERT (National Council of Educational Research and Training) was charged with shaping educational curricula, but under apparently independent India, it turned into a means of ideological engineering. Under several Congress-led governments, the council’s textbooks strongly relied on a Marxist historical theory that minimised India’s Dharmic heritage based on Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism in call of a story that stressed class conflict using colonial statistics meant to build atrocity literature against the colonised, and some colonial victimhood, ignoring the scores of Islamic invasions and treating indigenous Indian history as non-existent or negligible.
Consider, for example, how NCERT textbooks treat ancient India. In her book Sati: Evangelicals, Baptist Missionaries, and the Changing Colonial Discourse (2016), Meenakshi Jain and other academics contend that these textbooks constantly marginalised the philosophical and cultural roles of Hindu civilisation, depicting it as static and backward.
The attention turned to Mughal and British epochs instead, usually seen through a lens of economic exploitation rather than cultural exploitation. Critics argue that this was not an error but a conscious effort to cut young Indians from their Dharmic foundations, thereby substituting pride with a sense of historical inferiority.
Beyond school textbooks, universities like Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) became strongholds of Marxist philosophy and groomed waves of scholars, public servants, and political leaders immersed in socialist ideals. Creating an intellectual elite that gazed outward rather than inward, as sociologist Andre Beteille noted in Universities at the Crossroads (2010), these institutions usually gave Western theoretical frameworks—Marxism, post-colonialism, and secularism—precedence above indigenous knowledge systems.
The Left’s operational arm became the bureaucracy embodied by the Union Public Service Commission (UPSC), while academia furnished the intellectual scaffolding. Although the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) was meant to be apolitical, its recruitment and training procedures have long reflected a bias towards urban, English-educated candidates with a “progressive" bent. The UPSC syllabus, with its emphasis on modern history, political theory, and economic planning, naturally favoured those schooled in far-Left paradigms, many of whom emerged from the same university ecosystems.
This has had tangible results on citizens’ lives. According to political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta in a 2019 article for The Indian Express, the bureaucracy frequently behaves as a “self-perpetuating elite" cut off from the rural, religious, and vernacular situations prevailing in India. Suggesting state control over market forces or community customs, policies like land reforms and industrial licensing, hallmarks of the Nehruvian era, bore the imprint of socialist doctrine. Critics contend still that the IAS is a keeper of a perspective that values Western-style governance above India’s pluralistic ethos, therefore putting it out of sync with a people more and more assertive about their Hindu identity.
The judiciary has not escaped this ideological tide either. Enacted in 1950, India’s Constitution is a liberal one, but its interpretation has frequently leaned to the far-Left, especially following the 42nd Amendment in 1976 expressly introducing “socialist" into the Preamble. Landmark rulings such as the 1973 Kesavananda Bharati case, which founded the basic structure doctrine, codified a devotion to equity and welfare that corresponded with socialist values. The Supreme Court and High Courts have relied upon this model over time to support extensive state intervention from nationalisation in the 1970s to affirmative action policies in the decades since.
In The Indian Supreme Court and Politics (1980), legal authority Upendra Baxi contends that the judiciary’s posture mirrors the impact of a Left-leaning legal fraternity, several of whom were influenced by the same academic streams.
But critics note a contradiction: while the judiciary promotes socialism, it sometimes seems tone-deaf to public opinion, especially on subjects like temple administration or religious rights, where Hindu organisations believe their culture is disregarded. Traditionalists who saw the 2018 Sabarimala judgment as an imposition of secular values over Dharmic practice were outraged over the decision that let women of “all ages" enter the shrine of the meditating deity. Hindus worship living deities, and it is the belief of male and female devotees of Ayyappa that he must only be worshipped by men, children and older women in the Sabarimala temple in particular, while others may seek him out in scores of other temples.
The influence of the Left at the level of government has been both direct and indirect. Ruling for more than five decades post-independence, the Congress formalised a top-down, Westernised model of development—think dams, factories, and urban planning—that sometimes neglected indigenous practices which were in harmony with nature. Until dissolved in 2014, a Soviet-inspired body, the Planning Commission, best symbolised this strategy. Even coalition governments, including those headed by the Left Front in states like West Bengal and Kerala, reinforced this paradigm, blending Marxist rhetoric with electoral pragmatism.
This outward-looking attitude that admires European socialism or American liberalism has distanced the government from the Hindu ethos of India. Ignoring Hinduism’s role as a unifying cultural thread, the Left’s contempt for religious nationalism has transformed Hinduism into a backward force, according to political commentator Swapan Dasgupta in Awakening Bharat (2021). The outcome is a political organisation that frequently uses a language both literally and symbolically strange from the masses it purports to represent.
Most upsetting is the view that the Leftward influence has undermined the Dharmic foundations of India, hence creating a people who feel ashamed of their legacy. Concerted efforts to “de-Hinduise" India are seen in the NCERT’s curricular decisions, the secular bias of the bureaucracy, and the judiciary’s interventions. Advocates of this approach, including historian Sita Ram Goel in How I Became a Hindu (1982), claim that the Left, cooperating with Congress, presented India’s past as a series of caste discrimination and dogmatism, thereby obscuring its philosophical breadth and civilisational accomplishments.
In The Past as Present (2014), Left-leaning academics such Romila Thapar insist that their criticism of Hindu orthodoxy was intended to free, not insult, and so help to construct a modern, equal nation. Still, as public opinion changes, shown by the BJP’s rise since 2014, the disconnect between these institutions and the voters points to a reaction against years of Leftist dominance.
The permeation of colleges, bureaucracy, the judiciary and the government by the Indian Left is a narrative of ideological victory and, more and more, overreaching. Founded in Soviet ideal and Congress patronage, its socialist leanings have shaped an institutional elite that sometimes appears aloof, Westernised, and dismissive of India’s Hindu ethos. It is evident that as India changes, its institutions have a reckoning that will challenge their capacity to reflect rather than to determine the soul of the country as is wont in a democracy. Modernisation is not a contradiction to Dharma, a civilisational existence that has constantly revised its laws and doctrines to time and society in Smritis and Sahitya. The placing of it as such by the Left is a disingenuous repetition of its action against Christianity in its many Western homes. It manages to confuse and subvert a population whose mindset has been reinforced through various institutions across ages, and thus, a call to revising the tenets it is based on is getting louder as information flow is democratised. It remains to be seen whether it is acknowledged in time because the far-Left status quo has long been left behind.
Arunim Ghosh comes with a background in law. He is a contributing author covering foreign affairs and culture. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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