KOLKATA: 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.
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.
"West Bengal has been liberated," the diminutive Banerjee told a delirious crowd of cheering, dancing supporters outside her modest, one-storey residence in the state capital Kolkata.
"This is the victory of the people against years of oppression," she added.
With the final votes still being counted, Trinamool and its allies looked set to take close to 220 of the state assembly's 294 seats, with the Marxists reduced to less than 70.
The result effectively consigns the once-powerful CPI-M to the political wilderness.
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called Banerjee from Afghanistan, where he is on a two-day trip, to congratulate the fiery, unmarried 56-year-old who now looks set to take a more prominent national role.
"It's a profoundly important moment for the people of the state who had an intense desire for change," said political analyst Sabyasachi Basu Roychowdhury.
Banerjee, a populist who casts herself as a champion of the poor, has ridden a wave of popular discontent with the communist government's handling of the economy that has left industry in decline and the state neck-deep in debt.
"After 30 years it is like a revolution, a new chapter in the history of West Bengal has begun today," said Nandita Deb, a history professor in Kolkata.
Dhiren Chottopadhyay, a jute trader in Kolkata, compared Banerjee with Kali, the Hindu goddess of time and change.
"She fought and fought for years, never gave up and today she will be smiling the most," he said.
The Left Front had until recently won every election in West Bengal since 1977. But successive losses in local and federal polls had left the communists struggling for survival.
"Accumulated problems led to this," said senior CPI-M official Niloptal Basu as the scale of the defeat became clear. "Now we have to go back to basics." To compound the misery of the Left, the communist government in the southern state of Kerala was also ousted by the Congress Party, albeit by a far smaller margin than in West Bengal.
The decline of India's communists has been extremely rapid in recent years after they initially appeared to have ridden out the aftershocks of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
After an inconclusive general election in 1996, the late leader of the CPI-M, Jyoti Basu, had been within a hair's breadth of becoming prime minister at the head of a centre-left coalition.
But as India's economy took off in the past decade, the Communists struggled to remain relevant and seemed increasingly out of step with the national mood.
The anti-incumbency sentiment in West Bengal was fuelled by farmers' anger at being forced to sell holdings of fertile land under a government job-creation initiative 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.
Banerjee, whose mercurial nature and hot temper frequently land her in newspaper headlines, has promised to focus on reviving both industry and agriculture.
The leading Indian trade body FICCI applauded her victory, which it hoped would "usher in an era of rapid and inclusive overall economic development".
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