Orange and green neon signals end of a Red state

Few places can have celebrated India's election result with the kind of frenzy I saw as I arrived in Kolkata on Sunday night. But then again, few other places have endured 32 long years of Communist Party rule.

The air pulsated with crashing drumbeats and shrill Bengali singing.The crowds danced and waved flags. The streets were lit up by shimmering green and orange neon tubes spelling out the initials of the victorious Trinamool Congress Party.

It wasn't quite the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the Communists lost 20 out of 35 parliamentary seats in the state of West Bengal.

In Mumbai, celebrating in earnest had to wait until the Bombay Stock Exchange opened yesterday. The Sensex index of leading companies soared more than 17% in just a few hours - bad news for Russell Pinto, my office landlord, who sold all his shares expecting a hung parliament.

The business community bet that - with the Congress Party no longer dependent on the Left to support its majority - much-needed economic reforms will kick back into gear. At a national level, that hope may be fulfilled. But in Kolkata, the businessmen I met were ambivalent.

"The Communist party in Kolkata is what Congress is to India," the local head of one of India's biggest advertising agencies explained. "They are the party of stability. Businessmen have their established channels of communication now."

Mamata Banerjee, the rabble-rousing leader of Trinamool Congress, is seen as capricious, irresponsible and incapable of administration. She may be a Congress ally fighting what she sees as "Stalinism". But she is also more anti-business than the Communists.

She won the grass roots by protesting the Communist government's land acquisition for Tata Motors' Nano car factory and a chemicals plant, engineering a major political crisis. So while India's capitalists hail the Communists' defeat, in Kolkata they were trounced for being too capitalist.

* Steve Forbes, editor-in-chief of the "capitalist tool", as Forbes magazine likes to call itself, is in Mumbai tomorrow to launch an Indian edition with a glamorous bash at the Taj. But does this really mark a further step by India into the capitalist fold? The launch was delayed a full nine months by objections from various ministries.

* Jeffrey Archer is here on his latest book tour, and the huge coverage may be reminding him of his own days of high office. His blog notes that he discussed Corus and Jaguar with Noel Tata, half-brother of Tata's chairman. Then on Sunday, he told an audience he expects India's prime minister to make him transport minister.