India’s Voters Send Communists to Defeat in West Bengal

Mamata Banerjee, leader of the Trinamool Congress Party and a crucial ally of the governing Congress Party, won more than 60 percent of the seats in West Bengal’s state legislature and is all but certain to take the powerful state post of chief minister.

The beleaguered Congress Party, battered in recent months by a series of embarrassing corruption scandals, had a mixed performance. It retained control of Assam, a northeastern state that has only recently emerged from a bloody insurgency, but it suffered a setback in Tamil Nadu, where the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam party, or D.M.K., a key ally that has been at the center of the biggest corruption scandal in Indian history, was resoundingly voted out of office.

More than 140 million voters went to the polls in four states and a union territory in the past month, in elections that will shape the contours of India’s fractious and increasingly regional politics for the next few years. The results underscored the rising independence of regional party leaders like Ms. Banerjee and the increasingly high profile of female politicians at the state level.

Jayalalitha Jayaram, the leader of the main opposition party in Tamil Nadu — All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam — and a former movie star known mostly by her first name, is expected to become that state’s chief minister.

With these victories, nearly one-third of India’s 1.2 billion people will live in states governed by women. A woman, Sonia Gandhi, leads the Congress Party, and the parliamentary leader of the main opposition party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, is also a woman.

In Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, jubilant crowds danced in front of Ms. Banerjee’s modest home. Wearing her signature outfit — a simple handspun white cotton sari and plastic sandals — the woman her supporters call Didi, or big sister, declared her party’s vanquishing of the Communists “the new day of independence for the people of West Bengal.”

The ejection of the Communist Party was an ignominious end to an ideological political dynasty that until recently wielded considerable power in West Bengal. It also was a major factor in New Delhi, where it virtually held the first government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh hostage as a crucial member of its governing coalition.

“We accept the people’s verdict,” said Sitaram Yechury, a member of the Communist Party’s politburo. “People wanted change.”

Voters in Tamil Nadu dealt a stinging defeat to the D.M.K. and its octogenarian leader, M. Karunanidhi. A senior minister from the party is in a Delhi jail on charges that he sold valuable cellphone spectrum at bargain prices to politically connected companies, costing the treasury as much as $40 billion. Mr. Karunanidhi’s daughter has also been charged. Despite promises of free blenders, laptops and livestock, voters overwhelmingly chose the party of his archrival, Jayalalitha.

Congress Party officials played down the loss in Tamil Nadu. Ghulam Nabi Azad, a senior party leader, said that voters in Tamil Nadu were well known for denying the governing party a second term: neither of the two main parties has won a second term in two decades.

“In states like Tamil Nadu, Punjab and Kerala, hardly any party has won successive terms,” Mr. Azad told reporters.