Amid serious differences within the CPI(M) over whether to continue their alliance with the Congress or confront the Trinamool Congress alone at the time of crisis, a majority of Bengal State committee members is learnt to have voted for a “joint fight against the sustained attack on our partymen”.
According, to sources all the district committees save the powerful Burdwan and Jalpaiguri lobbies have voted for a pro-Congress stance, inside sources said.
The Pradesh Congress has also offered its hands saying it will continue to fight the Trinamool with the help of the left.
The CPI(M) State committee has prepared a report on the recently concluded Assembly elections and its future course of action and will send it for discussions in the central committee and Politburo, State party secretary Suryakanto Mishra said at the end of a two-day session on Sunday.
Though Mishra would not dwell on the future of the alliance, Pradesh Congress president Adhir Chowdhury referred to him while speaking to the media saying he was “happy that Suryakanto Mishra has talked in favour of continuing the alliance.”
He said his party would invite the left Front to its programmes. “We are a different political party and don’t decide on political programmes together,” but “we will invite them to our programmes.”
Though the Congress got about 12.5 per cent votes and the left Front got 25.5 per cent votes the former won 44 seats while the left got only 33 conceding the position of the principal Opposition party for the first time in the history of the State Independent India.
The CPI(M)’s two-day meeting assumed importance not only against the backdrop of the humiliating loss that the party suffered in the elections but also on account of serious difference in the party over the fate of the alliance with the Congress.
Even as a section of the leadership feared a vertical split in the State unit, three senior most Politburo members — CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury, his predecessor Prakash Karat and party veteran MA Baby — rushed in from Delhi to remain present in the State committee meeting.
In the meeting, Mishra and the other senior members of the State secretariat — with the exception of Biman Bose — strongly stood for the alliance saying but for the coalition the left would have fared even more badly.
Though Mishra would spell out the party’s decisions in public “as that is not the way we manage our affairs” sources said the State committee “quite firmly and aggressively” made known to the highest leadership that there was no way left for the outfit in Bengal but to go with the Congress till at least 2019.
Meanwhile, listing the reasons why the left fared poorly in the polls the State committee showed a few reasons in its report. These include, late formation of alliance with the Congress which made it difficult to convince the voters about its political efficacy; sustained violence by the Trinamool and threats issued by its top leadership making it difficult for the floating voters to make up their minds and failure on the part of the Election Commission to ensure ideal atmosphere in the first two rounds of the polls.