CPM leaders Sitaram Yechury and Prakash Karat.
First, they lost power to the Trinamool Congress and now, they are ceding space to the BJP.
The Left's sharp decline in West Bengal - the CPM managed just two seats in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections - is symptomatic of the party's existential crisis.
As the CPM started a four-day long meet of its Central Committee - the party's highest executive body - in Delhi on Sunday, differences among the party leadership, on what has led to the Left's downfall in its traditional strongholds of Bengal and Kerala, came to the fore.
Sources say a draft report prepared by the Prakash Karat-headed Politburo, the party's highest decision making body, seeks to review the party's earlier political strategies of building a "non-Congress, non-BJP front" in the wake of BJP's rise to power.
But Sitaram Yechury, also a member of the Politburo, differed. He argued that there was nothing wrong with the party's political strategy but the leadership has not been able to implement the strategies on the ground effectively.
Many would see this as his disagreement with the political line pushed by Mr Karat. Earlier, during the Left Front's face-off with UPA-I over the civil nuclear agreement with the United States, many believed the two leaders were not in sync. While Mr Karat pushed the Left to pull out of UPA-I, Mr Yechury didn't want such a bitter divorce.
Officially though, the party as well as the two leaders maintained that Left's separation with the UPA was a "collective decision."
"Now, the BJP is in government. On the one hand, the RSS is trying to push their Hindutva in governance, corporates are pushing their agenda in economic policy making. We have to factor in these things while preparing our future strategy," says a member of the CPIM's central committee, adding, "Ours is a party that does serious analysis but the media tends to bring it down to personalities."
The CPM is now preparing for its 21st party congress - an event that takes place every three years to elect its new leaders and adopt new political strategies. And, quite ironically, CPM's mega event is scheduled to be held next April at Andhra Pradesh's Visakhapatnam, a city which, much like the party, has been ravaged by the recent storm and is now seeking to rebuild itself.