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Election outcome positives

Few popular contests in recent memory have been as interesting, as instructive, and as productive of democratic positives as the April-May 2006 round of Assembly elections. The first big positive of course was the magnificent voter turnout, ranging from 70 to 80 per cent, in the five spiritedly fought Assembly battles — in two large and two medium-sized States and one Union Territory. Voting percentages in Tamil Nadu (70.56 per cent) and West Bengal (81.63 per cent) went up quite sharply over the 2001 level while Kerala (72.12 per cent), Assam (75.72 per cent), and Pondicherry (85.89 per cent) registered their customary highs. Politically speaking, these are the vanguard Indian States in terms of political awareness and citizen participation in the democratic process. Studying elections is a challenging but very worthwhile business. For this newspaper, it is a matter of satisfaction that the trust it placed in scientifically conducted polls, done in this round by a large team put together and led by Yogendra Yadav of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, has been vindicated by the electoral outcomes in all the four State arenas. In particular, the seat estimates offered by The Hindu-CNN-IBN exit polls (combined in three of the four States with post-poll surveys) were spot on for the difficult-to-predict electoral contests of Tamil Nadu and Assam and also for the one-horse race in West Bengal; only in the case of Kerala did the exercise turn out to be a moderate overestimate, by about 15 seats.

A nationally important political outcome is the emergence of a re-energised and stronger Left headed by the CPI(M). Led by a dynamic and far-sighted Chief Minister, the ruling front in West Bengal has increased its popularity, conquered new space, and routed a divided and confused opposition, setting a new world mark for the Left in multi-party elections. In Kerala, the outcome may seem to fit the traditional pattern of regime alternation but the Left Democratic Front has, following its clean sweep of the State's Lok Sabha seats in the 2004 general election, reaped its best-ever harvest of Assembly seats. After the Left, it is the Congress and the DMK that have done reasonably well in this round. The implications of all this for the health and stability of the United Progressive Alliance government are, in net, positive. But they can be turned to political advantage only if the proper lesson is drawn from the different outcomes: even in periods of fairly high economic growth, governments need to pay attention to the reality of mass deprivation and do something about it. In their own ways, the West Bengal, Kerala, and Tamil Nadu campaigns have underlined this message from the voters. What is superficially understood and depicted by sections of the media as resistance to reform or `populism' is actually a political coming to terms with structural inequities and the unmet basic needs of ordinary people. The UPA Government and all State governments need to be reminded that they can hope to do well politically only if they heed this lesson.

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