Elections began on Monday in India’s bread basket Punjab state, where the national ruling Congress party hopes to wrest back power amid voter anger over the struggling local economy. The poll, held under tight security, is one of five mid-term state election tests for Congress, which is headed by Italian-born party president Sonia Gandhi and is the leading member of the ruling national coalition in New Delhi. At least five people were killed in poll violence at the weekend in voting for a new legislature in the insurgency-hit northeastern state of Manipur, and tens of thousands of security personnel were posted across Punjab state.
Punjab, which borders Pakistan, is known for its revolving-door governments. No ruling party in the fertile wheat-growing state of nearly 30 million people has been re-elected to office since 1972, according to official records. Congress, out of power in the state since 2007, is therefore optimistic it will return to the helm because of voter anger over a sluggish agrarian economy, chronic power shortages, corruption and widespread unemployment.
Punjab once boasted India’s highest per-capita income, but it now stands in ninth place among India’s states and union territories, according to 2009/2010 government figures. Voters lined up even before the polling booths opened as 75,000 security men stood guard to ensure safety in a state wracked in the 1980s by a deadly Sikh separatist militancy.