India's Congress party faces triple northeast test

Elections in three small states in India's remote and revolt-racked northeast will provide another test for the ruling Congress party as it seeks to boost its shaky morale ahead of a national poll due next year.

While the states are small and lack political weight nationally, elections in Tripura, Meghalaya and Nagaland over the next few weeks will give Congress another sign of whether its popularity is falling across the country.

Congress suffered defeats to the rival Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the states of Gujarat and Himachal Pradesh last December.

"The results of these smaller states will matter for the Congress," said Mahesh Rangarajan, a political analyst and history professor at Delhi University.

"These elections are crucial for the Congress to boost its declining popularity, ahead of a series of coming elections in bigger states."

Elections will be held on February 23, March 3 and March 5. Results for all three states will be issued on March 8.

A series of bigger states, including Karnataka, Jammu and Kashmir, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan, will hold elections later in the year, while a national poll is due by early 2009.

In all three of the coming contests, Congress will be pitted not against the BJP but against a party with which it is allied in the national coalition government. That will not prevent some tough contests in each of the states.

In Tripura, a state that shares a long, porous border with Bangladesh, Congress faces an uphill battle trying to oust communists who have won three consecutive elections since 1993.

The communists are allied with the Congress-led coalition at the national level, but relations have been strained over a controversial civil nuclear cooperation deal with the United States, which the leftists blocked last year.

"It will be wrong to think that Congress is soft on communists because they are supporting us at the centre," Sonia Gandhi, Congress party chief and coalition leader, told an election rally in Tripura's capital city Agartala this week.

She asked the voters in Tripura to "end Communist misrule".

In Meghalaya and Nagaland, Congress is battling the Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) and Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) respectively, two major constituents of its federal coalition.

"In Meghalaya, Congress has a better chance, but in Nagaland it is going to be tough for the party," said New Delhi-based political analyst Kuldip Nayar.

LACK OF VISION

Local civil society groups say none of the political parties have offered any realistic proposals to solve decades of insurgency in the northeast or bring the underdeveloped region into the national mainstream.

India's northeast, encircled by China, Bangladesh, Myanmar and Bhutan, is home to more than 200 ethnic and tribal groups and has been beset by dozens of separatist and tribal insurgencies since India gained independence from Britain in 1947.

Tribespeople accuse New Delhi of taking away the region's mineral resources, giving them nothing in return and flooding the region with outsiders. More than 50,000 people have been killed in nearly 60 years of conflict.

Although the Indian government has contained violence to some extent by engaging rebel groups in peace talks, it lacks a long-term strategy to resolve complex disputes in the remote region, analysts say.

"People in general do not have much expectation," said Along Longkumer, editor of the Morung Express, an English-language published in Nagaland. "They know whoever comes to power it will be the same."