Poll rout leaves India's communists in limbo
http://www.myrepublica.com/portal/in...&news_id=31242
"KOLKATA, May 13: The Indian state of West Bengal said goodbye Friday to three decades of uninterrupted rule by the world´s longest-serving, democratically elected communist government.
Early results from state polls made it clear that the Left Front, led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI-M, had been swept aside in a landslide that marks the end of an era in India´s modern politics. The victor was the Trinamool Congress Party of firebrand national railways minister Mamata Banerjee, the largest ally of the Congress Party in the federal ruling coalition............."
From deeper in the article
".....The anti-incumbency mood in West Bengal was fuelled by anger among farmers over being forced to sell fertile land holdings under a government job-creation drive to lure industry.
The drive to industrialise marked a shift from the communists´ early days in power when they gave land to some 2.5 million rural poor under India´s largest distribution scheme, breaking the hold of West Bengal´s land-owning elite.
But as land shortages grew with farms being divided among families and unemployment climbed, the government shifted gear and sought to bring back factories ..................."
Some more thoughts on why they lost - you have to click next to keep reading.
Why the Left lost West Bengal
http://www.rediff.com/business/slide...l/20110513.htm
"The practitioners of all that Karl Marx had professed were vouching for the principles of Adam Smith by beating up farmers to forcibly acquire land for industrialists.
"I may be late but I am the latest," goes a classic Rajinikanth dialogue. Nowhere does this line hold truer now than in West Bengal................."
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