India's once powerful Communist party has suffered a massive blow with the confirmation today of the loss of Kolkata in municipal elections on Sunday.

Final results showed the Communist party of India (Marxist) had lost almost half of the 60 wards it had held in the eastern Indian city, long a bastion for the left.
The city's municipal council will now be run by Mamata Banerjee's All India Trinamool Congress party (TMC). The party, which despite its name is locally based, describes itself as "centre-right" and has been able to attract tens of millions of voters disillusioned after decades of Communist rule.
Kolkata was the only major Indian city run by Communists and the elections, seen as a "semi-final" for state assembly polls in West Bengal next year, have heralded a political "paradigm shift", according to experts.
"I don't think the left in India can recover from this. They have lost three straight elections in West Bengal in a row – council, parliamentary and municipal – and seem sure to lose the state next year. The left in India appears in terminal decline," said Professor Subrata Mukherjee of Delhi University.
Indian newspapers ran banner headlines proclaiming "Storm Mamata hits Bengal" and "Trinamool onslaught storms the Red Fort".
Banerjee today demanded that the 2011 state elections be held early.
"It is a historic victory of the ma-mati-manush [mother, land and people]. I salute the people. They have given a verdict in favour of political change in the state," said Banerjee, who is currently railways minister at a national level and part of the ruling United Progressive Alliance.
Nationally the Communists still hold Kerala, the major southern state known for relatively high levels of development and literacy, and Tripura, a tiny state in the north-east. However, Mukherjee said the left was likely to lose Kerala too at elections next year.
The Communist party first took control of West Bengal during a major wave of leftwing agitation in India in the 1960s, but lost it to the ruling Congress party amid violent unrest in the early 1970s. Restored to power in 1977, the Communists have held West Bengal ever since.
Many factors united to ensure the Communist defeat both in the city as well as in municipalities across West Bengal last weekend. Muslim voters who had previously voted Communist appeared to have swung against the incumbents. Also, the unreconstructed rhetoric of many Marxist leaders has less appeal for a new generation of more materialistic Indian voters.
Professor Sabayasachi Basu Ray Chaudury, head of political science at Kolkata's Rabindra Bharati University, said that the TMC had successfully won over many of the state's "urban-educated elite".
"Without at least their partial support, this result would be unimaginable," he wrote in the Mail Today newspaper.
For Mukherjee, the Communists in India, who claim nearly a million members and continue to have a small but powerful presence in national politics, will be marginalised unless they can transform themselves into "a reasonable social democratic party".