India's state elections: Unlucky day (The Economist, 13 May 2011)

Courtesy: "The Economist", 13 May 2011
India's state elections: Unlucky day
Friday 13th May will surely count as an awkward day for Congress, India’s ruling party, despite some apparently cheering poll counts. As results from local elections were published it became clear that in four states and a union territory, which together account for nearly 230m people, voters showed little enthusiasm for the party of prime minister Manmohan Singh.

The headline defeat, and one long expected, was for the Communist Party of India (Marxist), thumped in a landslide in West Bengal. The Reds had ruled for 34 uninterrupted years, but voters proved sick of the poor economic performance of their state, and of a party that is desperately short of ideas for how to fix things. Mamata Banerjee, the national railways minister and an energetic opponent of the Communists, stormed to victory at the head of her Trinamul Congress: the coalition that she leads was expected, as counting approached an end, to scoop over 220 assembly seats to an estimated, and paltry, 65 for the Reds.

In theory that was good news for the party of Mr Singh too, since his Congress is the junior partner in Ms Banerjee’s coalition in West Bengal. In fact however, the scale of the victory is troubling. So emphatic is the Trinamul success that Ms Banerjee will have no need of her ally to rule in the state, which has a population larger than Germany’s. That leaves Congress’s state MPs with precious little leverage. And the coalition partners have not been getting on: a bitter scrap before polling got under way, over how many seats each party would contest, almost saw them march their separate ways.

To the south, in Kerala, matters were more surprising. The state, also under Communist rule for the past five years, had been expected to swing comfortably into the hands of the Congress party. As we reported in April the well-educated and crotchety voters of Kerala almost always kick out their governments, when given a chance. And the Communists had annoyed important constituencies, notably religious ones, by pushing for a cap on fees charged by colleges (many of which are run by the church, for example). Yet results on May 13th showed an extremely close split between the left and the Congress party. In the end Congress scraped it by a handful of seats. That less-than-emphatic win looks troubling, especially for the likeliest next prime ministerial candidate of Congress, Rahul Gandhi, who had taken a personal role in campaigning and picking candidates there.

Results were grimmer still next door in Tamil Nadu, where Congress is allied to the ruling DMK party, which suffered a huge battering by a rival coalition led by the similarly named AIADMK. Latest counting suggested that the DMK would gather a few dozen seats, to their rivals’ 200 or so. That matters because the DMK is part of the national government with Congress (courtesy of its separate clutch of MPs in the parliament in Delhi). There it is most closely associated with dreadful corruption at the telecoms ministry, long run by a DMK man, A. Raja. And in neighbouring, tiny, Puducherry (formerly Pondicherry), a union territory which was a French colony until 1956 (nine years after the rest of India got independence, from Britain) Congress was kicked from office.

The only really bright spot for Congress was its emphatic victory in Assam, a moderate-size state of 31m in the north-east, where counting suggested it would get about 80 out of 126 seats. Congress had been in power already, and voters were grateful for relative stability and cheered their state rulers for having lured local militants to lay down guns and hold talks instead.

All in all however, Congress did not have a good day, despite being on the winning side in West Bengal, Kerala and Assam. To a large extent voters responded to local matters. But a national trend is discernible too. As in other countries, Indians have taken advantage of mid-term state polls to send a warning to their national government over issues that frustrate them. The most obvious—especially in relation to the dreadful showing of Congress and its ally in Tamil Nadu—is public fury over corruption. Similarly there is anger that economic growth, still racing along at nearly 9% a year, is not translating into a better life for all, especially given rises in the costs of food, fuel and other goods. Coming on the heels of another big state election late in 2010 in Bihar, where Congress was also badly thumped, the country’s ruling party looks vulnerable.

Congress, however, can take heart from two factors. It has fared badly in state elections before, and then gone on to win comfortable victories in national, general polls. Before the 2009 general election many analysts had concluded on the basis of previous state results that Congress was in trouble, only for it to outstrip everyone’s expectations. Second, the party’s main rival, at the national level, is the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has made much of the running in attacking the government over its poor corruption record. Though the BJP will find much to cheer in Congress’s troubles, the opposition party itself was almost nowhere to be seen in these five polls, emphasising that it struggles to spread its appeal beyond those parts of India where its Hindu-nationalist themes play well.

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