Rajya Sabha MP D Raja was appointed the general secretary of the Communist Party of India on Sunday, PTI reported. He was chosen to replace S Sudhakar Reddy at the helm of the party during the three-day meeting of the CPI National Council, the party’s top decision-making body, last week.

“The country is going through a critical period under the fascist regime of [Prime Minister] Narendra Modi,” Raja told reporters at a press conference in New Delhi. “The Left might have lost seats in the Lok Sabha elections and might have been reduced to a smaller force in Parliament, but it does not mean that we have shrunk within the country or our ideological and political influence has shrunk.”

The parliamentarian said the party was the hope for people of the country, and added that the Left would continue to fight against the “retrograde policies” of the Bharatiya Janata Party government.

“The BJP government may have won the electoral battle but not the social or the political one,” said Raja. “We want all Communist parties to come together. We will have to rework our strategies. That is what our parties are trying to do.”