India's Communists lost so many seats Saturday in their stronghold states of West Bengal and Kerala that their leaders are going to have to change their policies.
The so-called Left Front comprising of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and other leftist parties were leading in the races for only 25 seats in India's lower house of Parliament. That is 34 fewer seats than the Left Front won in the last elections in 2004.
"The Communist Party of India (Marxist) and Left have suffered a major loss," Prakash Karat, general secretary of the CPI(M) told reporters in New Delhi. "This necessitates action and re-thinking."
A weaker Left could mean more economic revamping for India. The Left, which supported the ruling coalition for most of the last five years, has consistently opposed economic reforms such as privatization, the easing of restrictions on foreign ownership, and the easing of labor laws.
Last July, Communist and other left wing parties withdrew their support from the ruling coalition to protest a pact on nuclear civilian technology transfer with the U.S. The government still survived a no confidence vote and went ahead with the deal, leaving the Left out of the government.
The backlash against the Left came from mismanagement and from their pursuit of outdated policies in New Delhi such as bashing the west and the Indian nuclear deal with the U.S., analysts said.
In the eastern state of West Bengal, one of the biggest issues was land. The Communist controlled state government has been forcing some farmers off their land to make way for industry. The highest profile land battle was over the land acquired by Tata Motors Ltd. to build the world's cheapest car, the Nano. The plans had to be shelved after months of protest over the plant.
The Trinamool Congress Party, led by firebrand politician Mamata Banerjee, led the protests and has been rewarded for its efforts. It was projected to have won 19 seats in the lower house, up from only one in the last election.
"It's over for the Communists. It's over," said Derek O'Brian, a leader of the Trinamool Congress party from the celebrations in front of Ms. Banerjee's home in Kolkata. "They have lost the connection to the people. We were with the people and the people were with us."
Derek O'Brian... is India becoming a nation of immigrants?
Kerala, a tropical state of 32 million people is struggling with the global downturn as thousands of its citizens return home from good paying jobs abroad. The state is dependent on income from the Persian Gulf because it exports so many laborers there. It's been hammered by sinking oil prices and a construction industry implosion in places like Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Kuwait. Congress and its allies were projected to win 12 seats of the 20 available from the state.
There are few jobs to come home to though. While Communists' policies have led to a literacy rate is more than 90%,
impressive
the state's militant labor unions, frequent strikes, and anti-Western policies, have scared off many investors and hurt growth.
Dumb. But it seems they've learnt from the experience.
Running in the state capital, Congress party candidate Shashi Tharoor, had never run or even voted before and he won against a veteran communist opponent. The author and former Under Secretary General of the United Nations said even he was surprised by the margin by which he won.
I wouldn't have thought retired senior UN functionaries would stoop to common electioneering, which only shows what I know.
"It's just unbelievable. Better (results) than all of our guesses," he said. "Wherever the government has been deficient, the voters have turned on mass against it."
Posted by: john frum ||
05/16/2009 10:50 ||
Comments ||
Link ||
[11126 views]
Top|| File under:
#1
Looks like a narrow win by Congress over the BJP.
#2
Shashi Tharoor looks set to be India's next Foreign Minister
Posted by: john frum ||
05/16/2009 16:14 Comments ||
Top||
#3
There are few jobs to come home to though. While Communists' policies have led to a literacy rate is more than 90%...
Not all that impressive Ms. Periwinkle, considering the literacy is in Hindi only. The Commies stopped English language instruction in the school systems in areas they controlled.
In other parts of India the schools teach Hindi and English, and any Indian family wealthy enough to afford it, send their children to private schools...a great many of them are run by the Jesuits.
Seems the elected Moaist government dupped the UN (Same UN guy who handles Gaza monitoring) on various points and are secretly plotting control of the army to enforce commie rule. PS - Other sources say Prachanda has a meeting planned for Bejing soon. The plot is thickening.
So the chairman of Nepal's Maoist radicals brags that he and his fellow-travellers tricked United Nations officials and admits that the 2006 peace deal was a sham - and gets caught on videotape doing it. The video of the recently resigned Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal, also known as Prachanda, was shot in January 2008 and just surfaced.
Revealingly, he instructs his fellow communists not to be fooled by the compromises struck with Nepal's democratic government. Seizing total power, he makes clear, remains the communist goal.
The latest crisis in Nepal is a useful case study in communist duplicity and instructive for those who believe that the path to peace with guerillas is cutting deals with them. The Unified Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) joined Nepal's government after a decade-long insurgency that left more than 12,000 dead. Under terms of the 2006 Comprehensive Peace Agreement, the Maoists agreed, among other things, to cut the size of their force in half, place their weapons under U.N. supervision and participate peacefully in the political process. In the 2008 elections, the Maoists emerged as the largest party in parliament with 30 percent of the vote, and Prachanda was named prime minister.
But the communists didn't consider the war really ended. The Maoists steadily maneuvered to increase their power with a view toward implementing their revolutionary agenda.
The latest step was an attempt to remove Nepal Army chief Gen. Rookmangud Katawal, who had resisted Maoist demands to integrate their guerrilla army into the national force. He maintained that the "former" guerrillas are brainwashed fanatics seeking to seize control of the army. He's got a point.
Nepal's President Ram Baran Yadav blocked Prachanda's move to sack Gen. Katawal. Prachandra resigned in protest. Nepal's supreme court now has the case.
Prachanda says it is a question of civilian control of the military. That's rich. Meanwhile communist thugs are taking to the streets in coordinated demonstrations calling for further intervention from the U.N.
The video of a relaxed Prachanda addressing his party faithful exposed the Maoists' cynical manipulation of the political system. In true communist spirit, Prachanda said that the compromises struck with the government were only tactical expediencies, and that the "bidroha," or rebellion, was still on. He joked about how they duped the United Nations Mission in Nepal (UNMIN) into thinking they had 35,000 fighters when in fact they only had 7,000 to 8,000, which allowed them to swell their ranks to 20,000 while claiming to be demilitarizing. And he confirmed Gen. Katawal's suspicions by saying it would take only a small number of his guerrillas to establish "complete Maoist control" of the Nepal Army.
He added that they had not turned over their weapons as required and that relief money earmarked for the victims of the civil war would be diverted to party coffers. "You and I know the truth," he slyly told his comrades, "but why should we tell it to others?"
In an unguarded moment, Prachanda revealed he is still a terrorist at heart and those who make deals with him are dupes. "Why would we abide by [the peace deal] after we win?" he said on the tape. "Why would we follow it when we have the upper hand?"
The situation in Nepal and Pakistan's Swat Valley illustrate the risks in bargaining with extremists, who do not change their goals, only their methods. The lesson is important when contrasted to Sri Lanka and Colombia, where we have seen the value of taking the fight to insurgents. U.S. deal makers should understand that there is more than one way to lose a guerrilla war. Sometimes it happens with the stroke of a pen.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
