ELECTIONS to the five state assemblies of Assam, Kerala, Puducherry, Tamilnadu and West Bengal have been announced. Polling will begin on April 4 and the process will continue till May 16. Counting for all the states will be held on May 19. These elections are important not only because it will determine who will form the state governments there, but it will also have a bearing on the future course of national politics.

The BJP alliance which has a comfortable majority in the Lok Sabha has not been able to maintain the momentum. After the initial victories in Maharashtra, Jharkhand and Haryana assembly elections, the BJP began to lose ground. In 2015, it lost the Delhi and Bihar assembly elections. In both these states, the BJP had won handsomely in the Lok Sabha polls. The disillusionment with Modi's grandiloquent promises was particularly pronounced in Bihar.

This time around, the BJP is not a major force in these states, except for Assam. But apart from doing well in Assam, it has to show that it is a growing force in the other states. This is going to be a tough proposition. Both in West Bengal and Kerala, the BJP had registered gains in the Lok Sabha polls getting 17 percent and 10.3 percent respectively. Despite all the hype about the BJP emerging as the alternative to the TMC after that, it is now clear that it has slipped down in popular support, despite its  desperate attempts to cash in on communal tensions. In Kerala too, the vote it mustered for the national election is not something it can retain in a state election. A section of the anti-Congress vote that it got in the Lok Sabha election will now go the LDF for the purpose of defeating the Congress-led UDF. Moreover, the people of Kerala have experienced the problems created by the policies of the Modi government. It is important to thwart the game of the BJP in Kerala of relying on Hindu communalism and enlisting caste groups.

The 22 month record of the Modi government, will in fact, play a role in all the states. In Tamilnadu, the BJP had cobbled a multi-party alliance for the Lok Sabha election. Now most of these parties have deserted the BJP. Among them are the DMDK, PMK and the MDMK. To expect the BJP to do well in such a situation would be wishful thinking.

As far as the Congress is concerned, the stakes are high, as two out of the three big states where it has governments, Assam and Kerala, are going to the polls. The third government being in Karnataka. Its other governments are in small states such as Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Manipur and Mizoram. In Kerala, the Oommen Chandy government stands totally discredited with its corruption, wheeling-dealing and miserable failure to tackle the economic problems facing the state. The LDF is well poised to deal a terminal blow to this government and to set the state on a fresh path. In Assam, the Gogoi government is a beleaguered one. Leaders from the Congress have defected to the BJP and its Bodo partner in government is now a BJP ally.

As far as the CPI(M) is concerned, electoral tactics have been worked out based on its political-tactical line for Tamilnadu, Puducherry and Assam. Based on the understanding that the independent growth of the Party and rallying the Left and democratic forces should be the priority, the Party is not having any understanding with the dominant regional parties.  In Tamilnadu, four parties, the CPI(M), CPI, MDMK and VCK, have come together to form the People's Welfare Front as an alternative to the two major Dravidian parties. In Puducherry too, the People’s Welfare Front has been formed.  In Assam, six Left parties have forged an alliance to fight both the Congress and the BJP.

For the CPI(M) and the Left, these elections are crucial because of West Bengal and Kerala. The battle in Bengal is not just about the formation of a government, but whether democracy which has been battered in the past five years will survive. The Left Front is fighting an arduous struggle in defence of democracy and against hoodlum terror. It is also a fight to save Bengal from the rapacious misrule of the Mamata Banerjee government. Both the politics of the TMC and the BJP would convert Bengal into a communal cauldron.  By gathering all the democratic forces and building people's unity, the TMC can be defeated.

The LDF in Kerala is placing before the people a pro-people development agenda at the centre of which are the rights and livelihood of the working people. The mass struggles waged in the past five years against the UDF government's policies and misrule will bear fruit in the elections.

(March 9, 2016)