Communists overthrown in two Indian states

NEW DELHI: A fiery opposition leader won a sweeping victory Friday against the Communists who have controlled the Indian state of West Bengal for more than three decades, in one of two major losses for the Communists in state elections.
Mamata Banerjee’s victory came as votes were being tallied in four other state elections across India.
Her allies in the nationally ruling Congress party expressed confidence that their coalition would emerge from the polls relatively unscathed despite a string of national corruption scandals and recent protests against food inflation.
The Communists also lost narrowly in southern Kerala, the only other state they had controlled, suggesting the party may have trouble in the next general elections in 2014. The results are a vindication of the pro-market reforms of Congress and its allies, which drew vocal opposition from the Communists.
Opponents have been trying to unseat the Communists in West Bengal since 1977, and Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress finally succeeded in a landslide.
Banerjee said the Bengali results reflected a 34-year “freedom struggle” and a “victory for the people.” She had asked her supporters to abstain from alcohol and victory rallies to help maintain calm in the volatile state. Security was tight against possible violence by Communist supporters upset about losing their source of patronage.
“We want to dedicate our victory to our people and motherland,” said Banerjee, who will likely quit as national railways minister to be West Bengal’s chief minister. “We will give good governance and good administration, not autocracy.” Trinamool and Congress had led an aggressive campaign in the mostly rural state, hammering the Communist-led government for economic stagnation, corruption, agricultural malaise and industrial decline.
“West Bengal was once the pride of India. The Communists have ruined it,” Congress leader Sonia Gandhi told some 10,000 villagers packed into a recent schoolyard rally in the state’s agricultural Murshidabad district.
West Bengal’s outgoing Communist chief minister, Buddhadev Bhattacharya, conceded defeat while thanking those who had supported the Communist-led alliance over the years. A Communist lawmaker in the national assembly said it was normal for Bengalis to seek change after 34 years, and that the party would be back.
He conceded that the Communists had lost re-election in the southern state of Kerala, but said the “unprecedented” narrow margin revealed it had been “one of the closest-fought elections” in the state’s history.
Partial results from northeastern Assam, where Congress has been holding peace talks with secessionist militants, also showed Congress and its allies with a wide lead over a fractured opposition.
Prime Minister Manmohan Singh congratulated Banerjee as well as Assam’s incumbent chief minister, Tarun Gogoi.
“Voters have reaffirmed their faith in the Congress government,” after it had reached out to the militants and helped calm the violent region, Gogoi said.
But in Tamil Nadu, Congress and regional ally Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam — which ruled the southern state — appeared headed for a major beating. The DMK was deeply implicated in a cell-phone licensing scandal that cost the nation an estimated tens of billions of dollars and forced one of the party’s leaders to resign as national telecoms minister before being charged with conspiracy and fraud.
Analysts said the loss, however, could end up benefiting Congress nationally by allowing it to divorce itself from its scandal-plagued partner.
Political analyst Mahesh Rangaranjan said it would now be “very difficult to say corruption doesn’t matter.” Congress has also come under fire for alleged mismanagement and corruption tied to the staging of last year’s Commonwealth Games and to the takeover of valuable Mumbai apartments intended for poor war widows by powerful bureaucrats and politicians’ relatives.
The tiny neighboring state of Pondicherry also voted.