KANPUR, May 4: Wherever rightwing Hindu revivalism has spread over the years across India, leftist trade unions in those areas have borne the brunt - some would say even more than the country's minority Muslims have evidently suffered.
As Kanpur goes to vote on Wednesday in the penultimate round of a bitterly fought Indian election, this decaying former industrial hub of Uttar Pradesh, the country's most populous state, seems to illustrate the point sharply.
Ms Subhashini Ali, former Hindu wife of Muslim filmmaker Muzaffar Ali, is leading the charge for the left from here. She is the candidate of the Communist Party of India (Marxist, CPI- M). Ms Ali, like a leftist colleague of the 1960s, who used to win the seat handsomely with ease, had represented Kanpur in the Lok Sabha but just once, two elections ago.
Now she is expecting to poll a mere 50,000 votes from more than a million-strong electorate, which may not be enough to save her deposit. Kanpur was a textiles producing centre, much like Ahmedabad, in Gujarat, or Mumbai of the 1960s. Strange irony that all three regions were once the nodal centres of India's leftist movement.
And now all three are bastions of Hindutva, the philosophy that aims to turn India into a theocratic state headed by Hindu revivalists. Logically therefore the main challenge to Hindutva should have come from the CPI-M and its other assorted left-leaning allies for they are the ones who have lost most at its hands.
Yet the battle has been joined by the Congress Party. And what may be even more ironical is that the Congress and the ruling pro-Hindutva Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) agree on the essential features of the country's decade-old economic reforms.
Of the 83 parliamentary contests in the fray on Wednesday, this particular segment of the polls in Uttar Pradesh would account for 30 crucial seats. It includes Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's contest from Lucknow, a seat he is tipped to easily win, but not with the margin that he had gained on the previous three occasions.
The Uttar Pradesh seats are crucial because opinion polls rightly or wrongly are predicting a hung parliament. So this is where the Congress hopes to increase its tally from nine out of 80 seats the last time, to a little or lot more. This is also where the BJP expects to make amends to the anticipated loss of its allies in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra.
In Wednesday's contest, two states ruled by the BJP are taking the vote. Rajasthan, with 25 seats, will have it out in one go on Wednesday, while in Madhya Pradesh, the state's 29 seats will be split between 12 and 17, the latter coming into play on May 10, the last leg.
Featuring in the last phase also will be the CPI-M bastions of Kerala, in the south, and West Bengal, bordering Bangladesh. In both the states, Kerala, with 20 seats, and West Bengal with 42, the CPI-M is contesting the Congress Party as its principal opponent.
Yet, as irony would have it, the CPI-M is among the few political groups that have offered to support a Congress Party government led by its president Ms Sonia Gandhi. This offer will have any meaning if the Congress wins a substantial number of seats, in any case at least 150 from the India-wide tally.
It is ironical that Ms Ali is fighting a Congress candidate in Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, the state where the CPI-M in a desperate gesture wants the Congress to do well.
If out of the three key candidates in the contest against the BJP in Kanpur, the sitting Congress candidate, seen as the frontrunner, loses by fewer than the 50,000 votes Ms Ali expects to poll, she would be adding to the difficulties that lie ahead for her party because the CPI-M does not want the BJP to get back to power again.
In the complex maze of Kanpur's electorate comprising the Muslims and leftists, the Congress and the BJP as well as two regional groups, the city reflects the chaos and the contradictions that lie in wait for the next government in New Delhi.
But in the narrow margins being predicted by exit and opinion polls for the main coalitions split between the BJP and the Congress, Indian leftists will influence the course of the post-poll political moves.
