INDIA: India's communist parties, broadly pursuing a capitalist and market reforms agenda, have swept to power in two of five provinces that recently held legislative elections, according to early results released by the Election Commission yesterday. Rahul Bedi reports from New Delhi
In the eastern Indian state of West Bengal, the communist-led Left Front government was celebrating its seventh consecutive victory, making it the world's longest-running elected communist administration.
It has been in office in West Bengal for nearly three decades.
"We had the people's complete trust and we knew we would win by a huge margin," Biman Bose, state secretary of the Communist Party (Marxist) or CPM, said as the Left Front led in 204 seats of the 294-seat provincial legislature late last evening.
A Communist-led coalition of nine parties, leading in 98 of 140 state legislature seats was also comfortably poised to wrest power from the Congress party in the southern Kerala state.
In India's federal structure of 29 states and six centrally administered regions, provincial legislatures are responsible for all aspects of governance other than defence, currency, railways and posts and telegraph.
In this complex and often turbulent formulation, the Communists, despite having become an anachronism in many parts of the world, are a major political forcein influencing the fortunes of the world's largest democracy.
After their best-ever performance in India's parliamentary elections two years ago, the Communists won 63 seats and emerged as the principal architects of the Congress Party-led federal coalition that displaced the Hindu nationalist administration. But they supported Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's 19-party coalition from outside government, declining to join it following a heated debate in which differences emerged on them becoming part of the ruling establishment.
The Communists' political muscle, however, resulted in parliament electing Somnath Chatterjee, its first Marxist speaker.
Government MPs concede the Communists can topple the government. This has led to them being accused of exercising power without shouldering responsibility and at times being a "dead weight" on the country's economic growth and global profile by opposing market reforms.
Marxist governments in Bengal, Kerala and Tripura (a northeastern province bordering Bangladesh) have intermingled Chinese-style land reforms with modernity and free-market principles.
Insisting on market reforms with a "human face", the leftists have consistently opposed badly needed labour reforms that are essential for India to attract overseas investment and sustain its growth rate - the world's second-highest after China's.
They have also stalled privatising state-run, loss-making industrial behemoths as their large workforce constitutes a committed leftist "vote bank".
In West Bengal, Marxist-backed unions have virtually paralysed the state's industrial growth, forcing its once-booming businesses and manufacturing units to either close down or flee.
Militant unions have also ensured the closure of numerous tea gardens across the province, rendering tens of thousands of people penurious.
Over the past two years, however, communist leaders have attempted to pacify India's booming financial markets by claiming they welcome foreign investment provided it augments existing productive capacities, upgrades technology and generates jobs.
They also make no secret of their hatred for the US and its capitalist policies, which they claim are designed for self-aggrandisement at a time Prime Minister Singh is edging politically, and militarily closer to Washington.
Communists have played a significant role in India's polity since independence in 1947. India's Communist Party - before it split in 1964 into the CPM (supported by Beijing) and the CPI (backed by Moscow) - was the world's first communist party to be democratically elected, in Kerala in the late 1950s.
This caused alarm and led to the US stepping up its covert anti-communist drive in India.
Separately, Congress Party president Sonia Gandhi has also been re-elected in a byelection.