London, Sept 12: British politics today witnessed a second revolution when Left-wing MP Jeremy Corbyn, initially dismissed as a 500-1 outsider, was elected the Labour Party leader after winning the contest in the very first round.

The first revolution occurred yesterday when Sadiq Khan, the Muslim MP for Tooting in south London, was chosen as Labour's mayoral candidate in preference to the favourite, Tessa Jowell.

Corbyn, 66, has been MP for a London constituency, Islington North, since 1983. He has always been on the fringes of the party and was only included as one of the leadership contenders by a handful of MPs who felt the voice of the far Left ought to be heard.

But no one expected him to win. Even MPs who nominated him said they would not actually vote for him.

But for some weeks now opinion polls have indicated he had overtaken the other contenders and was headed for a dramatic win.

And this was confirmed at a public meeting in London today when the results were announced. Out of 422,664 who voted, representing 76.3 per cent of the electorate. Corbyn got 251,417 votes. This was 59.5 per cent of votes cast, an absolute majority.

Voters were asked to rank their preferences 1 to 4 but second, third and four preference votes were not considered because Corbyn won in the first round.

Of the others, Andy Burnham got 80,462 votes (19 per cent); Yvette Cooper 71,928 votes (17 per cent); and Liz Kendall 18,857

votes (4.5 per cent).The MP Tom Watson was elected Labour's deputy leader with 198,962 votes (50.7 per cent) but in his case counting of third preference votes was required.

Corbyn's policies include re-nationalisation of such assets as the railways; pulling out of the EU; and scrapping Britain's nuclear submarine fleet.

A succession of Labour heavyweights, including Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, asked members not to choose Corbyn but he was swept to power by tens of thousands of young people who paid £3 and joined the party.

As far as India is concerned there will be an anxious phase until he announces whether he is going to pursue the cause of Dalits. So long as he was a political irrelevance as a backbench MP it did not matter much that he had aligned himself with Dalit groups in the UK.

But as the new Labour Party leader and possible future Prime Minister, he has the capacity to whip up Dalit discontent.

On one occasion he said: "I do not agree with the view in the popular press that we should not give aid to India. (But) I want to draw attention to the treatment of Dalits in India."

Three years ago, he said: "Dalits are the largest group of people in the world who are systematically discriminated on the

basis of their descent and caste. They perform the worst jobs in the dirtiest conditions and have the shortest life

expectancy. ..Apartheid in South Africa was wrong and Dalit discrimination is equally wrong anywhere in the world."Corbyn succeeds former Labour leader Ed Miliband who (unlike Rahul Gandhi) stepped down after losing the general election.

Miliband today offered Jeremy Corbyn his support - and called on the rest of the party to do the same.

He said: "I offer Jeremy Corbyn my support in what is a very difficult and demanding job and I hope that people across the party will do the same. At the same time, I hope and expect that Jeremy will do everything he can to reach out and use the talents of people right across the party in the task of taking on the Tories and facing up to the very big challenges that we face."

In his victory speech, Corbyn said: "Can I start by thanking everyone who took part in this election, this huge democratic exercise of more than half a million people all across this country."

He turned on the media: "I also say a huge thank you to all of my widest family, all of them, because they have been through the most appalling levels of abuse from some of our media over the past three months, it has been intrusive, it has been abusive, it's been simply wrong.

"And I say to journalists: attack public political figures, make criticisms of them, that's okay, that is what politics is about. But please don't attack people who didn't ask to be put in the limelight, merely want to get on with their lives, leave them alone, leave them alone in all circumstances.

"The media and maybe many of us simply didn't understand the views of many young people within our society.", they have been written off as a non-political generation who is simply not interested, hence the relatively low turnout and low level of

registration of young people in the last general election. They weren't. They are a very political generation that were

turned off by the way in which politics was being conducted, and not attracted or not interested to it, in it, we have to and must change that."

"And to my friend Sadiq Khan, who has been elected as our mayoral candidate for London," he went on, "Sadiq we are going to

be campaigning together and we are going to be campaigning together particularly on the crucial issue of housing in London. I

am fed up with the social cleansing of London by this Tory government and its policies."