2006 Elections and India's Ruling Coalition

Paranjoy Guha Thakurta

In the current era of coalition politics in India, the influence of political developments in states or provinces on the central or federal government is not just inevitable but more often than not, quite significant. The elections to four state assemblies Assam, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu and Kerala and the Union territory of Pondicherry, that took place in April and May 2006, the results of which were announced on May 11, too has had an important bearing on politics in New Delhi.

The Congress, which leads the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) coalition government, has certainly not become stronger in fact, it has become weaker. This is despite the fact that the party has managed to remain in power in the north-eastern state of Assam, albeit with the support of coalition partners. The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) has been able to come to power in Tamil Nadu in south India but, for the first time in the history of the state, the ruling party is in a minority and has been able to form the government only with the support of its coalition partners, including the Congress. The fact that the Left has become more powerful by getting re-elected in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal and by forming the government in Kerala in the south means that the four Left parties led by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), that are providing crucial “outside” support to the UPA government with its 61 members of Parliament, would now be able to exert greater pressure on the Manmohan Singh government, especially on economic policy issues. The principal opposition party in India at present, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has been and remains politically insignificant in these states.

Assam
Assam is by far the most populous of the seven states, or “seven sisters” of the north-eastern part of India which is separated from the rest of the country by a narrow “chicken's neck” in West Bengal. But more than the geographical separation, the people of north-east India have for long felt alienated from the country's mainstream. Questions relating to sub-nationalism and regional identity, illegal immigration and violent separatist movements have dominated the political discourse surrounding Assam for more than half a century. Till December 1985, nine out of the ten individuals who served as Chief Ministers of Assam belonged to the Congress party; the exception was Golap Chandra Borbora of the Janata Party who was Chief Minister between March 1978 and September 1979.

From the late 1970s, a series of agitations against the state government as well as the Union government spearheaded by the All Assam Students' Union (AASU) paralysed the working of Assam for long periods. President's rule was imposed in the state on no less than three occasions in December 1979, June 1981 and March 1982. In the 1980 general elections, polls were not conducted in 12 out of the 14 Lok Sabha constituencies in the state the Lok Sabha is India's lower house of Parliament. In December 1985, nearly one year after the 1984 general elections had taken place, the voters of Assam exercised their franchise. Again in 1989, the Lok Sabha elections did not take place in Assam. Until recently, many political observers believed that national parties like the Congress and BJP had lost most of their influence in Assam. The 13th general elections (September-October 1999) and the 14th general elections (April-May 2004), however, proved such a perception wrong. Not only did the electoral fortunes of the Congress revive, the BJP too performed better than it ever had in the state.

The outcome of the 12th and the 13th general elections had delivered rude shocks to the former student leaders of AASU who had gone on to form the Asom Gana Parishad (AGP) after the 1985 accord with the Rajiv Gandhi government in New Delhi and had come to power in the state. During both the 1998 and 1999 elections, the AGP could not win a single Lok Sabha seat in Assam. The Congress, as already mentioned, had played a dominant role in the state. It was only in the 1985 Lok Sabha elections in Assam that the vote share of the Congress dipped below the 45 percent mark. Between 1985 and 1991, the share of the Congress in the total votes polled in the state went up from below 24 percent to over 28 percent in both the Lok Sabha and assembly elections. Thus, the improved performance of the Congress in the next three general elections was not entirely surprising.

In the 2006 assembly elections, however, the political calculations of the Congress went quite awry. The number of seats held by the Congress in the assembly came down from 71 to 53 and its vote share shrunk by nearly 8.5 percent. The party was able to form the government by cobbling up a majority with the support of 12 members belonging to the Bodoland People's Progressive Front (Hargrama faction) or the BPPF(H) and independent members of the legislative assembly (MLAs), including Congress rebels. In a sense, the Congress was saved from an embarrassing exit from power only because of the internal conflict within the AGP.

The official AGP, now led by Brindaban Goswami went along with the Left, and won 24 seats, while the AGP (Progressive) headed by former Chief Minister Prafulla Kumar Mahanta was all but wiped out with Mahanta only managing to win one out of the two seats he contested. By the time the Assam accord was thrashed out in 1985, large sections of people in the state had become completely disillusioned with the Congress. Two years earlier, in 1983, following an all-party meeting convened when Rajiv Gandhi was Prime Minister, Parliament had passed the Illegal Migrants (Determination by Tribunal) Act or the IMDT Act. The accord was aimed at disenfranchising illegal immigrants who had settled in Assam in the period between 1965 and1971, the year in which Bangladesh became an independent nation-state. After the erstwhile AASU leaders formed the AGP, which came to power in 1985, many in Assam believed the accord would be fully implemented. The AGP was also expected to try and resolve the problems of unemployment and lack of industrial development in the state, issues which the party's leaders had themselves raised as student leaders.

It did not take very long for the realisation to sink in that the process of detecting and deporting illegal immigrants was easier said than done. The biggest “constraint” of the IMDT Act was that the onus of proving that a person was a foreigner rested with those who made the complaint. Much to the dissatisfaction of the AGP, the party's leaders realised that the state government as well as its supporters would at best be able to identify a few hundred thousand “illegal immigrants” and that it would be next to impossible to deport even these individuals to Bangladesh. Not only was the AGP government unable to tackle the issue of “foreigners” effectively, the party's leaders proved to be as inefficient, corrupt and fractious as those belonging to the Congress. Far from setting up employment generation schemes, the erstwhile students' leaders fell out with one another, the most significant being the parting of ways between Mahanta and his one-time associate-turned-bitter-rival, the late Bhrigu Kumar Phukan.

As the AGP weakened, the Congress was able to return to power in the May-June 1991 elections winning 66 out of the 126 seats in the state assembly. In the same election, the AGP's vote share nearly halved from 35 percent in 1985 to under 18 percent in 1991; the number of the party's MLAs shrank from 65 to 19. Unhappy with the AGP's poor track record in power, sections within the party started breaking off and one radical group formed the United Liberation Front of Asom (ULFA), which proclaimed the need for a violent secessionist movement. The ULFA, which claims that the only way the problems of Assam could be resolved was if the state ceded from the Indian Union, remains active in large tracts in the state and some of its leaders are reportedly operating out of Bangaldesh.

With the Supreme Court of India repealing the controversial IMDT Act in September 2005 (which now under appeal before a larger bench of the court), the Manmohan Singh government moved quickly to amend the Foreigners Act to ensure that the Muslim community in Assam would not be completely alienated. The move evidently worked, although the Muslims in the state did vote tactically in certain areas. A new political outfit called the Assam United Democratic Front (AUDF), comprising Muslim organizations and led by the wealthy businessman Badruddin Ajmal, made its presence felt for the first time by winning 10 seats in the assembly.

At one stage it had appeared as if Ajmal and the AUDF would play king-maker in Assam, but incumbent Chief Minister Tarun Gogoi did not need their support and instead went along with the BPPF(H). Nevertheless, the significance of the AUDF making its presence felt in Assam's political scenario may be gauged from the fact that it won 10 seats out of the 69 it had content whereas the BJP won the same number of seats in the state assembly after contesting no less than 125 seats or all but one.

West Bengal
Many individuals who are not familiar with West Bengal have wondered what makes this state in eastern India unique among the 28 states in the country. Why has the electorate here voted a Communist government to power seven times in a row since 1977 some sort of a world record?

The political opponents of the Left Front, a coalition of seven political parties led by the Communist Party of India-Marxist (or CPI-M), used to claim that the supporters of the ruling regime in the state would “rig” elections through strong-arm tactics and intimidation of voters. It was further argued that over the years, the Left had won elections because its sympathizers control the local administration as well as the police force. This time round, however, such claims are not being made with the usual vociferousness because the Election Commission of India had pulled out all stops to ensure that elections were conducted in a free and fair manner. In fact, for the first time, elections in the state were conducted over five days.

The Communists and their supporters had always claimed that they could not have manipulated the outcome of the polls simply because the votes that have been cast against the Left during seven successive assembly elections have accounted for close to half of the total valid votes polled. In the current round of elections, the vote share of the Left Front went up only marginally from 49.4 percent in 2001 to 50.2 percent. However, given the way the first-past-the-post, winner-takes-all electoral system works, the number of seats held by the Left in the 294-member West Bengal assembly went up impressively by 36 from 199 to 235.

More importantly, the anti-Left vote was splintered. Five years ago, the Trinamool Congress led by Mamata Banerjee had ditched the BJP and the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) on the flimsy excuse that former Defence Minister George Fernandes had not quit the government after the Tehelka episode. The Trinamool cobbled up an alliance with its parent, the Congress, and the combine obtained 39.3 percent of the total votes cast in West Bengal. The Trinamool ended up with 60 seats in the assembly and the Congress with 26 (plus three independent candidates supported by it). This year, the Trinamool stuck with the BJP -- which does not have much of a support base in the state ending up with 28.9 percent of the vote and 29 assembly seats; the Congress won 21 seats with two independent legislators supporting it.

Interestingly, the Trinamool managed to retain much of the its support base in Kolkata the Left hardly increased its vote share in the city (from 42.3 percent to 42.5 percent) but won nine instead of eight seats. It, therefore, became clear that although sections of the urban upper and middle classes have apparently moved towards the CPI-M remember that during the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, for the first time, only one anti-Left candidate won and she was Mamata herself from south Kolkata residents of urban areas in the state, especially Kolkata, by and large remain opposed to the Communists.

To return to the substantive question: Why have the strong anti-incumbency sentiments that have prevailed in all states in India been conspicuous by their absence in West Bengal? Those who support the Left Front argue that this is largely on account of the quality of governance of the state government, its land reforms programme and “Operation Barga” a scheme to provide more rights to tillers of land that were initiated through the 1980s. The weakness of the Opposition had made life that much simpler for the Left far from matching its organizational strength, both the Trinamool and the Congress cannot even find enough supporters to act as election agents in all the polling booths in the state.

What has undoubtedly helped the Left is the image of Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee (who became chief minister of the state in November 2000), who is often compared to Deng Xiaoping. Bhattacharjee, 63, who took over the reins of the state from former chief minister Jyoti Basu, now nearly 93, is not afraid of welcoming foreign and multinational inverstors to the state and has stated time and again that it is not possible to establish socialism in one province in a capitalist country. Basu too had an image of being a “pragmatic” Communist who has the distinction of having been India's longest serving chief minister for nearly 25 years. This election, in order to counter anti-incumbency sentiments, the Left inducted over 100 relatively young candidates into the electoral fray and dropped older representatives, including over a dozen ministers in the state government.

Whereas the base of the Communists in West Bengal had been largely rural and among those who benefited the most from the Left Front government's rural development schemes, the chain-smoking Bhattacharjee has focused much of his government's attention on the renewal of Kolkata, the state's capital that used to also serve as India's capital till the first decade of the 20th century. The city that had become notoriously decrepit has recently been improved with a second bridge over the River Hooghly, an underground railway, besides new flyovers and multi-storied buildings.

Opponents of the Communists contend that the Left too has been opportunistic in its political strategy. In New Delhi, the ruling Manmohan Singh government is dependent on the support of 61 MPs belonging to four Left parties for its survival in power. In West Bengal, on the other hand, the Communists and the Congress are arch political opponents. The CPI-M claims there is no contradiction in its position because it is supporting the Congress-led UPA coalition for the specific purpose of keeping communal forces represented by the BJP out of power. At the same time, the Left remains staunchly opposed to many of the economic policies of the Congress which it believes are no different from those followed by the BJP.

The West Bengal government has realized that it cannot continue to accuse the Union government of having neglected the state for decades by, among other things, initiating a policy of “freight equalization” of coal and steel prices that robbed the eastern region of many of its locational advantages. Once a centre of steel making and heavy industry, many large factories in the state have shut down throwing hundreds of thousands of workers out of their jobs. Now the state wants to jump on to the information technology bandwagon. During his media conference on May 11 after the outcome of the elections became known, Bhattacharjee was beaming when he announced that the Tata group would be setting a car manufacturing plant in the state.

What cannot be denied is that West Bengal has a long way to go before it can alleviate the acute problems of poverty and unemployment that persist in certain pockets in the state, in districts like Purulia, Bankura and Medinipur. The proportion of the state's population living below the poverty line is said to have come down from over half three decades to just over a quarter at present or close to the national average. The state also faces problems of separatism in its northern district of Cooch Behar and infiltration from Bangladesh is a major political issue in districts like Malda, Murshidabad, Nadia and North 24-Parganas bordering Bangladesh.

The undivided province of Bengal was partitioned twice, first by the British colonial government in 1905 and then in 1947 when India became politically independent and East Pakistan was created. On the second occasion, the state witnessed the influx of large numbers of refugees. In 1971, after East Pakistan ceased to exist and instead became the independent nation of Bangladesh, there was another round of influx of refugees into West Bengal. That the ravaged economy of the state has witnessed a revival in recent years has certain helped the Left Front retain power. The splintered opposition was the icing on the cake.

Kerala
A key difference between Kerala and the other two states in which the Left is a major political force in India (namely, West Bengal and Tripura) is the fact that the Left Front in Kerala includes parties that do not subscribe to a leftist ideology, which is why it is called the Left Democratic Front (LDF), rather than merely the Left Front. It is also a fact worth noting that neither West Bengal nor Kerala or Tripura has ever had a single-party government since the Left first came to power in each of these three states. In Kerala, this has meant that the state has not had a single-party government since 1957, when the E M S Namboodiripad government became the first elected communist government in the world.

The Namboodiripad governments of 1957 and 1967 initiated radical land reforms of the sort never seen anywhere in India before, except in Jammu & Kashmir under the National Conference. These governments were also responsible for setting up what remains, to date, the only universal Public Distribution System (PDS) in the country. It is important to explain the significance of this move. The responsibility for running the PDS in India is shared jointly by the Union and state governments. While New Delhi is responsible for centralised procurement for the PDS and for passing on the grain, sugar, etc. procured or obtained through levies to the states, the states bear the responsibility of actually distributing material under the PDS to the populace. As a result, the actual coverage of the PDS varies widely across states. Kerala has the distinction of being the only state with a PDS that reaches every resident of the state. Also, Kerala's PDS distributes through its chain of fair price shops several itemslike soap, detergent, etc.that are not part of the centrally determined list of items to be made available under the PDS.

Kerala's record in health care too is remarkable in comparison to other states in India. The Human Development Report 2003 of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) had written: “The state of Kerala, India, has health indicators similar to those of the United Statesdespite a per capita income 99 percent lower and annual spending on health of just $28 a person.” By any yardstick, this is a considerable achievement, particularly considering that Kerala is not even among the most prosperous Indian states. The fact that the Left has repeatedly lost and regained power in Kerala has not undone the radical measures it has taken while in office. Land reforms, which ensured the abolishing of landlordism and the distribution of small land holdings to millions of agricultural labourers who were till that stage landless are arguably major factors in Kerala having significantly better social indicators than any other Indian state. The land reforms and the universal nature of the PDS also go some distance towards explaining the fact that Kerala has significantly lower poverty ratios than many other states with much higher per capita incomes, despite the fact that industry is relatively underdeveloped in the state.

In recent years, the Left in Kerala has also been at the forefront of initiating genuine decentralisation of the planning process down to the level of the village panchayatn or local body. Again, as with earlier radical measures taken by the Left in the state, decentralisation has proved irreversible even after the Left lost power in the state assembly elections in 2001. Unlike in many parts of India, the political battle in Kerala between the LDF and the Congress-led United Democratic Front (UDF) has been very closely fought. A difference in vote share of two percentage points has made the difference between victory and defeat for one or the other of the two political formations. Many state assembly constituencies in Kerala have been often won or lost by a few hundred votes.

Since anti-incumbency sentiments have always been rather strong in Kerala politics, few were surprised by the victory of the LDF in the 2006 assembly elections. All the opinion polls and exit polls had unanimously predicted defeat for the incumbent UDF government that had been headed first by A K Antony and then by Oomen Chandy. The Congress was weakened by the decision of the former Chief Minister K Karunakaran to break away from the parent party and form his own political outfit. In the case of the Congress and the UDF, their chief ministerial candidate was clearly Chandy. The Left, however, dilly-dallied on this issue by first stating that CPI-M veteran V S Achyutanandan, or 'VS' as he is popularly known, would not be standing for elections and then announcing that he would in fact be contesting the polls.

The media in the state emphasized the divisions in the ranks of the CPI-M. Before it was known that that VS would be in the electoral fray, it seemed evident that the chief ministerial candidate of the LDF would be Pinaryi Vijayan, state secretary of the CPI-M. As a matter of fact, the two were supposed to be leading two distinct factions within the party: Vijayan was described as a leader of the “moderate” group in the CPI-M (in the mould of West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee) whereas Achyutanandan was perceived as a “hardliner” who was firmly rooted in the trade union movement in the state.

Whatever be the differences within the CPI-M in Kerala, real or perceived, these did not clearly prevent the LDF from defeating the UDF in the state. In fact, the Left won by what was certainly a huge margin by Kerala standards. The LDF increased its vote share by 5.65 percent, winning 98 seats or 59 more than in 2001 when it won just 39 seats. On the other hand, the UDF suffered major setbacks with seven of the cabinet ministers in the Oomen Chandy government losing. A key ally of the Congress in the UDF, the Indian Muslim League, too suffered major political losses with two-thirds of its candidates losing the elections, including candidates who stood from constituencies in the Malabar area that was considered the party's stronghold. The strength of the Indian Muslim League in the assembly came down from 16 to seven. As for the Congress, the main constituent of the UDF, it contested 77 seats but won only 24 against 62 in 2001.

Tamil Nadu
Tamil Nadu can lay claim to at least one unique feature in Indian politics -- it is the only state in which no national party has ever been in power for nearly four decades, to be precise, since 1967. Nothing can illustrate the lasting impact of the 'Dravidian' movement in the state better than this simple fact. Yet, ironically, each of the several pillars on which that movement was built has been dismantled by parties that are offshoots of that very same Dravidian movement. The pillars of the movement were anti-Brahminism, an antipathy to the north of India and its predominant language, Hindi, atheism, rationalismnone of these is in evidence today in the inheritors of the Dravidian movement, so much so that J Jayalalithaa, former Chief Minister and head of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK) is herself an upper-case Brahmin. Also, her government had been one jump ahead of even the BJP in pushing through a law ostensibly aimed at checking forcible religious conversions. As for the hostility to the north, both the DMK and the AIADMK have, since 1998, had alliances with the BJP, a party that was till a few years back almost entirely confined to north India and was seen as the most ardent champion of a unitary nation in which the hegemony of Hindus and Hindi was taken as an evident truth.

Tamil Nadu today has more political parties represented in the Lok Sabha than any other Indian state. The 39 MPs that the state sends to the Lok Sabha belong to as many as eight political parties. (West Bengal had at one stage representatives of seven parties in the Lok Sabha.) In the 1998 elections, there were nine parties representing these 39 Lok Sabha constituencies in Tamil Nadu. Despite this proliferation of parties, the state has not had a coalition government since its inception, that is, until 2006. Even when alliances have won assembly elections, it has invariably been the case that the leading party in the winning alliance has secured a majority of the assembly seats on its own, enabling it to form a government without having to accommodate the junior partners.

Till as late as 1998, the only national parties with any presence in Tamil Nadu were the Congress, the Communist Party of India (CPI) and the CPI(M). The BJP had not won even a state assembly seat, let alone a Lok Sabha constituency in the state. Even the three national parties that did have a presence in the state were in no position to contest on their own and had to align themselves to one of the two main Dravidian parties -- the DMK or the AIADMK -- to be able to make any headway in terms of winning seats in either the assembly or the Lok Sabha. In 1998, Jayalalithaa surprised everybody by tying up with the BJP for the Lok Sabha elections. Political pundits, opinion polls and exit polls all suggested that the experiment would be a failure. The results proved all of them completely wrong, with the AIADMK-led alliance winning 36 of the 39 seats in the state.
Besides the AIADMK and the BJP, the coalition included a clutch of smaller partiesmany of which had come into being only in the 1990slike the Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK), the Pattali Makkal Katchi (PMK), the Tamizhaga Rajiv Congress (TRC) and the Janata Party. Though the BJP managed to register its presence in India's southern-most state after the 1998 general elections, it was hard put hard put to win a single seat on its own strength in the state in the 2006 assembly elections against four seats five years earlier.

The reasons for the dominance of the AIADMK and the DMK in Tamil Nadu politics since 1967 lie in a socio-political movement whose origins can be traced back to the Justice Party formed in 1916 in what was then the Madras Presidency of the British Raj. The Justice Party was formed by P Thyagarayar as a platform for the area's non-Brahmin social elite. In the first general elections in British India held in 1920, the Justice Party won a landslide victory in the Madras Presidency, bagging 63 of the 98 seats. It remained in power in the provincial government for the next 17 years, advocating “social justice and equality” for all segments of society. E V Ramaswamy Naicker (EVR), who was a member of the Indian National Congress, found himself agreeing with the ideology of the Justice Party. He joined the party and started the Non-Brahmin Self-Respect Movement in 1925. In 1944, by which time Naicker was the leader of the party, he renamed the party the Dravida Kazhagam (the Dravidian Federation) and demanded the establishment of an independent state called Dravidasthan. The Dravidian movement had thus begun.

Tamil Nadu has 234 Assembly seats. In 2001, the Congress won seven of the 14 it contested but benefited when the Tamil Maanila Congress (TMC) merged with it. The TMC had won 23 of the 32 seats it contested. The AIADMK swept to power winning 132 of the 141 seats it contested, while the DMK led by Muthuvel Karunanidhi won only 31 of the 183 seats it contested. The Marumalarchi Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (MDMK), led by rebel DMK leader V Gopalasami, also called Vaiko, failed to win a single seat though the party contested in 211 seats.

In the May 2004 Lok Sabha elections, the DMK-Congress alliance had thrashed the AIADMK alliance by winning all the 40 Lok Sabha seats in the state as well as in the Pondicherry. Unlike the Left that those to support the UPA government in New Delhi from outside, the DMK became a significant partner of the Congress in the UPA. This shock woke Jayalalithaa up. In the months that followed, the former Tamil Nadu Chief Minister unleashed a series of programmes aimed at wooing the poor and very poor. She offered free books to any student, girl or boy, up to Class 12. She also offered Rs 500 to every woman who reported pregnant at the local government hospital. If the woman delivered a child, she got an additional Rs 5,000. This was aimed at trying to end the practice of female feoticide in Tamil Nadu. With a slew of other schemes, Jayalalithaa ensured that every poor family got at least one monetary offering a month.

And in the first week of March, she managed to break the DMK-led alliance when she got Vaiko to her side. This was the same Vaiko whom Jayalalithaa had kept in prison under the Terrorist and Disruptive Activities Act (TADA) for 29 months because Vaiko was said to have spoken to Tamil activists from Sri Lanka who belong to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). The state government had also been complimented for its efforts during the relief and rehabilitation the victims of the tsunami.

Despite the AIADMK's attempts to match the DMK in announcing populist schemes, such as providing rice at Rs 2 a kilogramme and free television sets, Jayalalitha and her party lost the polls. She had tried very hard to change her image she was seen as a haughty and arrogant leader. After dismissing many striking state government employees, she agreed to reinstate them. None of these moves eventually helped her in the April-May 2006 assembly elections. The DMK emerged as the single largest party in Tamil Nadu after polling 26.45 percent of the votes and winning 96 seats. Its biggest ally Congress won 34 seats, a huge improvement from 2001 when the party won only 7. The alliance obtained 44.73 percent of the votes, around 4.7 percent more than its opposing coalition.

Tamil Nadu politics has been influenced greatly by its film personalities. Jayalalithaa and her political mentor, M G Ramachandran, were both actors while current Chief Minister Karunanidhi used to be a prolific scriptwriter. In 2006 too, a recently formed political outfit headed by a film personality, Vijayakant, who leads the Desiya Murpokku Dravida Kazhagam (DMDK), played the role of spoiler by fielding candidates in as many as 206 out of the 234 seats in the assembly; the party's candidates were placed in the third position in many constituencies and indirectly worked towards the defeat of AIADMK candidates. In fact, the DMDK polled 8.38 percent of the total votes polled in the state, which was almost equal to the vote share of the Congress and four times more than the vote share of the BJP (2.02 percent).

Another newly floated party that entered the electoral fray for the first time was the Lok Paritrana party that was led by former and current students of the Indian Institute of Technology at Chennai (formerly Madras, the capital of Tamil Nadu). This party sought to make a point that educated individuals should enter politics. However, the best a candidate of the party could do was to be placed in the third position in the posh Anna Nagar constituency in Chennai.

An interesting fallout of the 2006 assembly elections in Tamil Nadu has been that the Congress and the DMK have more dependent on each other. As already mentioned, the DMK is for the first time heading a coalition government in the state with the Congress as one of its partners, while the DMK would continue as an important constituent of the UPA government in New Delhi this is some consolation for India's grand old party that has become weaker in the three other state where assembly elections took place, namely, Kerala, West Bengal and Assam.

Pondicherry
In this former French colony which is a small Union territory in south India with an elected assembly, the Congress has been plagued by infighting and factionalism. In 2006, the party high command decided to take a tough stand against dissidents, some of whom had broken away from the Congress and entered into an alliance with AIADMK to take on the N Rangaswamy led the Democratic Progressive Alliance (DPA) coalition led by the Congress and comprising the DMK, the PMK and the CPI. In 2001, the Congress had won 13 seats and the DMK, twelve; the two formed the ruling coalition. In 2006, the DPA coalition won 20 out of the 30 seats it contested (against 25 in 2001) with the Congress winning 10 out of the 16 seats where it fielded its candidates. The DMK won seven seats, the PMK two and the CPI one. The AIADMK front won only seven seats, including three by the AIADMK. Four rebel Congressmen won, including one who stood as an independent candidate. If the Congress had remained united, it would have won 14 seats instead of ten; the party may then have been able to form a government on its own with the support of two extra members of the assembly instead of leading a coalition government.

The Fallout in New Delhi
The results of the 2006 assembly elections clearly indicate that with the Left parties having become more powerful, this group would attempt to exert greater influence on the Congress party as well as the UPA government headed by Manmohan Singh, especially on issues concerning India's economic policies and foreign policies.

After the government announced on June 5 that it had decided to increase the price of petrol by Rs 4 a litre and diesel by Rs 2 a litre, the Left parties were up in arms. Communist leaders announced that they would participate in street demonstrations protesting the decision that would fuel inflationary fires thereby curtailing the real incomes of ordinary citizens. Union Minister for Petroleum and Natural Gas Murli Deora justified the price hike by pointing out how international prices of crude oil had doubled over the two years the UPA government had been in power in New Delhi. India currently imports three-fourths of its requirements of crude oil. Deora emphasized that most of the burden of more expensive oil imports had not been passed on to the consumer. If prices had not been increased, the finances of India's publicly owned oil refining and marketing companies would have gone deep into the red. He added that the government had not hiked the prices of subsidized kerosene and cooking gas.

The Communists were not impressed by these arguments. They argued that the government should have cut taxes instead of increasing prices. The prices of motor spirit and diesel in India are relatively high because roughly half the consumer price is accounted for various kinds of taxes and levies including taxes on imports (customs duties), manufacturing (excise duties) and retailing (sales tax). In neighbouring Pakistan, for instance, petrol sells at around one-third the price it does in India.

Although a section of the ruling Congress party is in agreement with the Left on the impact of the hike in the prices of petroleum products, this group has no option but to the support the government's unpopular move. At the same time, this section realizes that the government's allies in the Left are appropriating the space of the political opposition. India's leading opposition party, the right-wing, Hindu nationalist BJP is currently in the throes of an internal power struggle and is preoccupied with the fallout of the murder of one of its important political leaders, Pramod Mahajan, by his younger brother. Though the BJP too has opposed the decision to increase petrol and diesel prices, it has not been able to attract the kind of attention the protests of the Left has.

The ability of the Communist parties to influence the thrust and tenor of the government's economic policies has increased of late after the Left became more powerful by winning provincial elections in West Bengal and Kerala. Without the support of 61 members of Parliament belonging to the four Left parties, the UPA government would fail to muster a majority in the Lok Sabha. The Left is supporting the UPA government from “outside” on the basis of a common minimum programme (CMP) that was thrashed out in May 2004. Whereas the Communists support many of the government's economic policies, the Left also argues that the UPA has not been sincere about implementing particular programmes outlined in the CMP.

The Communists claim there is little to distinguish between the economic policies of the Congress-led UPA regime and those followed by the previous NDA government that was headed by the BJP. They contend that the two largest political parties in India both believe in the virtues of market-friendly policies of economic liberalization, privatization and globalization. Many of these policies are bitterly opposed by the Left. The Communists say these policies have not alleviated the economic conditions of the underprivileged, but sharpened inequalities and exacerbated regional imbalances. (The Left has extended support to the UPA government as it considers the BJP to be “communal” and against the minority Muslim community.)

Spokespersons of the Congress say the party believes in the ideals of socialism that are enshrined in India's Constitution although it simultaneously believes that private enterprises have to play a bigger role in the economy. Many in the Congress believe that India, like China, should be attracting more foreign investment than it has in the past. Whereas the Communists has often been publicly critical of foreign investors in New Delhi, in West Bengal, that has been ruled by the Left Front for nearly three decades, the state government has been laying out the red carpet for multinational corporations.

One of the important areas of agreement between the Congress and the Left relates to the implementation of the ambitious National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme that has been described as the world's largest social security programme. The scheme legally guarantees employment to one able-bodied member of a poor family living in a rural area at the official minimum wage for 100 days in a year.

Unlike this programme which has been wholeheartedly supported by the Left, the Communists have in the past successfully stonewalled a government proposal to offload a minority stake in Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited, a profit-making government-owned company and one of India's better-performing public sector corporations. Veteran CPI-M leader and former Chief Minister of West Bengal Jyoti Basu recently accused the Manmohan Singh government of wanting to sell the shares of BHEL to foreigners. “…they (meaning the Congress-led government) are becoming more and more pro-American and depending on the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and the World Bank. We don't like that,” Basu added.
Because of pressure from the Left, the government has had to postpone plans of divesting government-held shares in more than a dozen leading industrial public sector companies. Moreover, proposals to sell equity shares in publicly owned banks have also had to be suspended. In the run-up to the assembly elections held in April and May, the CPI-M had used strong language to hit out at the UPA government. Party general secretary Prakash Karat told an election rally in Kerala: “The UPA government is anti-people. The central government is not following the common minimum programme. The government does not care for farmers across the country. The Left would strongly oppose the move to privatize public sector banks in the country. The government is opening India's retail sector to Western multinationals. We will not allow it. The youth in the country are not getting any new jobs. I want to know from (Congress president) Sonia Gandhi why the government is reducing job opportunities for the youth.”

Other points of difference between the Congress and the CPI-M relate to reintroduction of quantitative restrictions on imports of commodities backed by domestic and export subsidies in developed countries, increase in import duties to protect agriculture, protection of biodiversity and seed rights of farmers and the establishment of an institutional state framework to fight bio-piracy. The CPI-M has also called for a review of amendments to the Indian Patents Act which, it is argued, weighs heavily in favour of multinational pharmaceutical companies. The CPI-M wants to revert to a universal public distribution system (PDS) of foodgrain and other essential commodities. The Congress, however, argues that the focus of the PDS should be only on families living below the poverty line. The CPI-M stresses on higher government subsidies on agricultural inputs while the government wants to drastically reduce power subsidies.

On farm policy, the CPI-M insists on strict implementation of land holding regulations while the Congress merely suggests that it would redouble its efforts to distribute surplus land. The CPI-M wants prohibition on sale of agricultural land to foreign companies or their subsidiaries for agri-business operations while the Congress invites foreign capital in agriculture. The Congress accused the Left of double standards since the West Bengal state government has been welcoming multinationals like Pepsi in food processing and contract farming.

The Left and the Congress have also been at loggerheads on the provisions of a bill to change the pattern of utilization of proceeds of pension funds, on the issue of allowing foreign direct investment in retail outlets, on increasing the rate of interest on deposits parked with the Employees' Provident Fund Organization and on increasing the foreign investment limit applicable on telecommunications and insurance companies.Within the Left, there is a section that is more “liberal” in its attitude towards foreign investment. The CPI-M itself has changed its attitude towards foreign investment over the years and has welcomed it in specific areas such as information technology and agro-processing, provided new jobs are created and the country's knowledge base is enhanced. Though it opposes sale of government stake in profit-making government-owned sector corporations, the CPI-M is in favour of a more efficient public sector.
In the words of the CPI-M: the Union government has addressed its concerns only when it needs its support of the 61 Left MPs on legislative matters while on policy issues, the government has taken a number policy decisions despite protests from the Left . These decisions include the decision to partly-privatize the two largest airports in the country at Delhi and Mumbai, lifting the cap on foreign direct investment in telecommunications companies, allowing foreign investment in single-brand retail outlets and the sale of the government's residual equity stake in Bharat Aluminium. The Left has also opposed the government's proposal to make the Indian currency fully convertible on the capital account. Till the middle of June, the Left had sent over 19 notes to the government on its views, mainly on economic policy and foreign policy issues. The Communists are still fuming about American President George Bush's visit to India, the India-US nuclear deal and the government's decision to vote against Iran in the International Atomic Energy Agency.

West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee has displayed considerable enthusiasm for capitalist-style reform. Under him, the West Bengal government has privatized loss-making state-owned companies and his critics have accused him of seeking to curb the influence of unions. In public, however, Bhattacharjee says he does not believe in economic liberalization if it means a “hire and fire” policy for workers. There is a long history of differences between the Congress and the Left on economic policy issues. These differences have not narrowed and may widen in the coming months. At the same time, what cannot be denied is that there is a section within the Congress that supports the Left overtly and covertly on economic policy issues.

What keeps the Left and the Congress together is, of course, their common enemy, the BJP. This factor alone may ensure that the Manmohan Singh government continues to remain in power in the foreseeable future, even if the going will certainly not be smooth.

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