NEW DELHI // Two of India’s most powerful women politicians, Mamata Banerjee and J Jayalalithaa, won fresh terms as chief ministers of West Bengal and Tamil Nadu on Thursday, as the results of five state elections were announced.
In Assam, an alliance led by India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) overturned 15 years of rule in the state by the Congress party, which sits in opposition in the national parliament. Congress also lost control of Kerala, where a coalition of communist parties stormed to power.
There was some respite for the party in Puducherry, however, where Congress ousted a regional party comfortably, winning 15 out of 30 seats.
Perhaps the biggest surprise came in Tamil Nadu, where Ms Jayalalithaa’s party, the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (AIADMK), secured an outright majority in the state’s 232-seat legislature.
Exit polls following voting on Monday had been divided on the probable results. Of the seven exit polls conducted by media agencies, six had predicted a win for the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK), the main opposition.
But on Thursday it was declared that AIADMK had won 134 seats, compared to the DMK’s 86. It is the first time since 1989 that a party has won two consecutive terms in the state.
Peer Mohamed, a Chennai-based political analyst, said Ms Jayalalithaa’s win did not surprise him. A smaller survey conducted by Ippodhu.com, his political analysis website, showed that the state’s rural poor – comprising half of the electorate – supported her party.
“In particular, it was Jayalalithaa’s education push that the poor appreciated,” Mr Mohamed said. “For five years, she has distributed 3,000 rupees (Dh163.50) worth of school supplies – uniforms, schoolbags, geometry boxes – to every student from a family below the poverty line.”
“The parents really appreciated this subsidy, which was an eye-opener when we did our surveys,” he added. “The other factor was that women voters outnumbered men this year, and the women seemed to have voted in favour of the AIADMK.”
In Kerala, where the incumbent Congress-led government had been plagued by corruption scandals, the results were more predictable.
Congress won just 22 of the state assembly’s 140 seats, with the coalition it led winning 47 altogether. The Left Democratic Front (LDF), a coalition of communist parties, won 91 seats.
Despite its victory in Puducherry, Congress’s losses elsewhere on Thursday have deepened the party’s downwards spiral since losing the national election in 2014.
Things looked better for the BJP, however. In Kerala, the party had mounted a full-throttle campaign to break its record of never having won a seat in the state assembly or an Indian parliamentary seat from the state.
It came after the party emerged “as a big force in the recent elections to the Thiruvananthapuram city corporation, where they even pushed the Congress to third place”, said B R P Bhaskar, a Thiruvananthapuram-based political analyst.
The BJP was ultimately successful in breaking this record on Thursday, though only won one seat. It also claimed second or third spots in more than 90 constituencies, however – a remarkable tally for a party that has never had a foothold in Kerala.
The BJP also won 60 of 126 seats in Assam, more than double Congress’s tally.
Through its campaign in the state, the party promised Assamese voters that illegal Muslim immigrants from neighbouring Bangladesh would be deported.
Ahead of the BJP’s declared victory, its leader in Assam, Sarbananda Sonowal, said: “The big challenges [ahead of us] will be sealing the border, infiltration, and unemployment.”
Every exit poll conducted in Assam had predicted that the BJP would come to power.
Five out of seven exit polls had also predicted that Ms Banerjee, the leader of the Trinamool Congress, would continue as chief minister of West Bengal.
These five polls were proved right on Thursday when the Trinamool Congress won 211 of the state’s 294 seats.
Ms Banerjee attributed her party’s repeated success in West Bengal to her ability to run a clean government.
“There is no corruption in Bengal,” she claimed. “It is a corruption-less state.”
ssubramanian@thenational.ae