INDIA’S Communist-led Left Democratic Front (LDF) defied ruling party violence to win legislative elections in Kerala state yesterday.

Voting took place in five states over six weeks, with the count held yesterday.

The LDF won 91 of the 140 seats in Kerala, up 24 on the 2011 election, with more than three quarters of the state’s 26 million voters turning out.

The National Congress Party-led United Democratic Front slumped from 70 to 47 seats, while India’s Hindu chauvinist ruling party the BJP gained its first state seat.

But the victory was muted by the deaths of LDF supporters in a bomb attack and clashes with BJP activists.

The Political Bureau of the Communist Party of India- Marxist (CPI-M), the driving force behind the LDF, said the electorate had “decisively rejected the Congress-led UDF’s track record of unprecedented corruption and misgovernance.”

In West Bengal state the LDF, which lost out to the local split from Congress in 2011, ceded another 27 seats this year to finish with 76.

And the BJP gained control of Assam from Congress — inheriting the problems of a serious left-wing Naxalite insurgency.

The CPI-M said: “In the absence of an effective secular democratic alternative, the massive anti-incumbency against the three-term, 15-year-long Congress government and its anti-people policies in the state benefited the BJP.”

The communists put the return of the All India Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam government in Tamil Nadu state down to vote-buying.