''The Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress has emerged triumphant in the just-held municipal elections in West Bengal, and reduced the Left Front to insignificance. The TMC’s victory run, from the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, the 2011 Assembly elections and rural panchayat polls last July, has established it as Bengal’s pre-eminent party, ahead of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM). ''
Tag - Elections
Winning by polarising the Gangetic plains?
The shortest, if dirtiest, route to victory in the circumstances is to polarise politics along religious lines by engineering communal violence. This is exactly what happened in Muzaffarnagar-Shamli in Western UP. A minor incident—a youth allegedly made lewd remarks to a girl of another community—was converted by RSS-VHP-BJP rumour-mills into “love jihad” (seduction-abduction of Hindu women), triggering Jat-Muslim clashes, in which 40 people were killed and 50,000 displaced.
Role reversal in West Bengal?
Of all the Assembly elections due or in progress in India, those in West Bengal are critical and of pivotal importance. They will determine the fate of the Left, a significant current in Indian politics whose intellectual and moral-political influence far exceeds its parliamentary strength. Most opinion polls and more cerebral assessments suggest that the Left Front, led by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM), will lose the elections.
Big Setback For Congress, Half a victory for BJP
By giving the National Democratic Alliance a less-than-generous majority of 30 seats in the Lok Sabha, and sizing the Congress down to less than 115 seats, the electorate has delivered a discriminating, complex and regionally differentiated verdict.
The BJP’s Dual Agenda: The non-‘hidden’ one is bad too
As these lines appear in print, India will have begun evaluating its 600 million electors’ verdict in hard numbers.
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