Word: indias
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...crumbling eastern metropolis of Kolkata. The somber portraits of dead white men - a bearded Marx, a bespectacled Lenin, and Stalin, his moustache bristling - peer down at passers-by from banners strung up over palm trees or street-corner billboards, accompanied by the less-hallowed visages of local comrades. India's Communists have been key players in the hurly burly of the world's largest democracy, dominating the ballot box in states like West Bengal, where Kolkata is the capital, and where a Communist government has ruled for over thirty years. But this month's national elections, won decisively...
...Amid the hundreds of acronyms that make up India's political landscape, the Communists rank among the few recognized "national" political parties of India, along with the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the ruling Congress party. Competing for 130 seats, they only won 20, losing more than half their seats in the 543-seat lower house and suffering particularly costly setbacks in their strongholds of West Bengal and Kerala. In the last government, the Communists and their allies - known collectively as the Left Front - were an influential part of the ruling coalition. Now they have been relegated...
...Things are likely to get worse for India's Communists before they get better. Their defeats stem in part from a record of poor governance in the states where they draw most of their support; in West Bengal, a move by the ruling Communists to take land from peasants for private industrial projects led to a voter backlash in May's elections. Party insiders expect the outcome of state assembly elections in 2011 will end their already thin grip on power, and a growing schism between CPI-M politicians pushing for capitalist reforms and the more orthodox intellectual elite...
...little surprise that far-left politics have thrived in India, where a third of the country remains below the poverty line and the majority still ekes out a living in the countryside. While the main Communist parties have always tied their lot to parliamentary democracy, championing land reform and opposing moves toward privatization, myriad splinter groups fighting for the marginalized and dispossessed continue to wage bloody insurgencies in pockets of the country. Still, India's remarkable economic growth in recent decades and its emergence as a key player in global affairs under the Congress-led government of Manmohan Singh...
...country's focus now is more on the effect of the Communists' absence. Unshackled from leftist dogmas against free trade and deregulation, Singh's new government is expected to push through significant liberalizing measures, including reforms of public sectors such as banking, health and education, and an overhaul of India's bloated state bureaucracies...