May 13, 2011 will go down in the political history of India as the day Ms Mamata Banerjee at the head of Trinamool Congress ended the Left Front's 34-year uninterrupted rule in the West Bengal.
Down South, in Tamil Nadu, another woman, the AIADMK's Ms Jayalalithaa orchestrated a landslide victory over the DMK.
Kerala saw a neck-and-neck race between the Congress-led UDF and the CPI (M)-led LDF, with the former scraping through with the most slender margin ever.
The Congress tasted success yet again in Assam where it will be the single largest party for a third successive term. In Puducherry, making a spectacular electoral debut, the All India NR Congress in alliance with the AIADMK secured a two-thirds majority in the 30-member Assembly, ending the DMK-supported Congress rule.
The results seem to have cheered the market and India Inc, with the Sensex rallying from the red to close 196 points up. Industry chamber FICCI, which had a personal interest with its Secretary-General, Mr Amit Mitra, taking on and defeating the West Bengal Finance Minister by a considerable margin, said that “it looked forward to associating itself in the new Bengal government's efforts to develop the State”. The CII felt that the deciding factor in the State elections had been growth, development and governance.
POLITICAL EQUATIONS
The Assembly poll results had their reverberations at the Centre too. Political pundits predicted more clout for Ms Banerjee and a larger say for her in vital issues such as fuel price hike, land acquisition, and the FDI policy.
The uncertainties for the ruling Congress could deepen due to its Tamil Nadu alliance with the DMK and the major blow it has faced in the Andhra Pradesh by-elections to the Kadapa Parliamentary and Pulivendula Assembly constituencies, where Mr S. Jagan Mohan Reddy and his mother, Vijaya Lakshmi, who broke away from the Congress, have won with record-breaking margins.
According to analysts, apart from being singed by the 2G kickback scam, the Congress will once again have to make compromises for its allies and face more pushes and pulls with regional forces becoming powerful. But the Congress did not seem perturbed, at least for now. Around noon, as the rout of the DMK-Congress became apparent in Tamil Nadu, Congress spokesperson, Ms Jayanti Natarajan, said the party would ‘introspect', but not dump the DMK just because of an election defeat.
The Tamil Nadu and West Bengal verdicts also throw up the possibility of doubling the number of women chief ministers in the country to four. “This will better the gender balance in governance,” pointed out a political analyst.
The architects of the two landslide victories signalled plans for an overhaul of the administration in their respective States. Ms Banerjee, who is likely to quit as Union Railways Minister to take over as West Bengal's Chief Minister, said: “We want to dedicate our victory to our people and motherland…We will give good governance and good administration, not autocracy...”
In Chennai, Ms Jayalalithaa expressed her gratitude to the people of Tamil Nadu and said her first priority would be to restore law, order and governance in the State.
MONEY POWER
While the Election Commission was widely lauded for the way the polls were conducted across the five States, the Chief Election Commissioner, Mr S Y Quraishi, voiced serious concern over the growing influence of money power in elections.
Appealing to political parties “to introspect” over the brazen use of money, he said the Commission had seized Rs 70 crore from the five States. Of this Rs. 60 crore was recovered from Tamil Nadu alone.