Phase five today, long wait begins for May 16

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New Delhi: Tamil Nadu

When the results were announced on May 13, 2004, the alliance that swept Tamil Nadu went on to rule the country. As the state’s 39 seats go to polls exactly five years on, the reward is the same: power at the Centre.

The electoral sweep by the DMK-led ‘rainbow’ alliance is now part of history: the alliances are not the same, nor is the ground situation. Though Tamil Nadu has a history of voting en masse for a single party or coalition, not many predict a similar sweep this time.

This time, the DMK-Congress-VCK combine is pitted against the AIADMK-PMK-CPM-CPI-MDMK alliance. However, this is not a straightforward numbers game like last time, as delimitation and the DMDK will also count.

As the election came to an end, the attention of all parties was focused on the war in Sri Lanka between the army and the LTTE that seemed to have entered a conclusive stage.

West Bengal

Of the 11 seats going to the polls in this phase, 10 are with the Left and one— Mamata Banerjee's own seat of Kolkata South—with the Trinamool Congress.

If the Congress-Trinamool Congress alliance in West Bengal is striving to dent the Left bastion in this Lok Sabha election, its hopes are pinned on the urban core of greater Kolkata, comprising the city and its two adjoining districts of North and South 24 Parganas.

Significantly, the Congress has not been allotted a single seat out of these 11 in the seat-sharing agreement with the TMC. A section of Congress leadership agreed to the arrangement grudgingly but later extended support to Mamata Banerjee following clear directives from the high command.

The Left Front's asset is its organisational set-up and grassroots-level mobilisation of cadres. The LF feels it has an added advantage. “The urban young voters have witnessed how Tata was driven out of Bengal, destroying hundreds of job opportunities”, claims a veteran Left leader.

Punjab

The Congress in Punjab will wait for the outcome of the elections on Saturday with its hopes up as nine of the 13 constituencies in Punjab go to the hustings in the last phase of elections. It had lost all but two seats in the 2004 elections.

The campaign is being seen in the state as a contest for political supremacy between chief minister Parkash Singh Badal and his son, deputy chief minister Sukhbir Badal on the one hand, and former chief minister Capt Amarinder Singh on the other.