The End of Communism?
While observers had widely anticipated the end of the nearly three-and-a-half decades of Communist rule in India’s state of West Bengal, there was nothing certain about the electoral outcome in Kerala, another red state. Early projections of election results kept swinging between the Congress-led United Democratic Front and the ruling Left Democratic Front until the UDF scraped past the 70-seat mark it needed to secure a narrow majority in the state’s assembly. Of the UDF’s 72 seats, Congress alone secured 38 and the Muslim League 20. The LDF, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), won 68 seats.
The victory of the Congress-led group over the Communist-led alliance in the southern state spells the end of communism in India–at least until the next elections. The Communists only remain in power in the small state of Tripura, in northeastern India. But the CPI(M) has all but lost hope for Kerala. In a statement, the party played down their defeat there saying that: “The results in Kerala show that the people have by and large endorsed the record of the LDF government of the past five years. The Left Democratic Front has very narrowly lost the elections with the UDF getting a slender majority of only two seats.”
Speaking to reporters after the official election results were announced, Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan said that despite the narrow victory margin, his party “will sit in the Opposition,” and would not try forming an alternative majority in the assembly. Kerala stayed true to its reputation–built over 30-years–of voting out the incumbent. Although many expected the Congress-led alliance to win simply because of this anti-incumbency tendency, there is more to these results than just a voting pattern. The defeat of the Communist-led alliance in West Bengal dealt one of the biggest blows to India’s Left in recent Indian history, making the LDF’s defeat in Kerala more significant than just a routine alternation between Left and Congress governments.