West Bengal’s ruling party defeated after 34 years:

Indian PM set for boost from state polls

Tamil Nadu DMK poised for resounding defeat:

INDIA: India’s ruling Congress party was set for an election boost Friday in local polls that ended decades of communist rule in a key state and lifted the fortunes of under-fire Prime Minister Manmohan Singh.

In the largest of the five states involved, West Bengal, Congress’ local ally won a landslide to sweep aside the world’s longest-serving democratically elected Communist government, which has been in power for 34 years.

The Trinamool Congress (TMC), led by populist Mamata Banerjee, and Congress looked set to win more than two thirds of the 294 seats, condemning the ruling Left Front to the wilderness in a major political upheaval for the state.

Early results elsewhere gave Congress a certain victory in northeastern Assam and the edge in two of the other three states — southeastern Kerala and the tiny union territory of Pondicherry.

However, in southwestern Tamil Nadu, another key Congress ally was poised for a resounding defeat, as a telecom corruption scandal that has dogged the national government torpedoed the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK).

The state polls were seen as a mini-referendum on the popularity of 78-year-old Singh and his government, which has been paralysed by corruption scandals and under fire over high inflation for much of the past year.

“Congress’s performance is very good. They are overall in a comfortable position,” Sanjay Kumar, a political analyst at the Centre for the Developing Societies think-tank in New Delhi, told AFP. New Delhi, AFP