Alleged backroom parleys on future camaraderie between left and the Congress tended to give out its first fruit of mutual cooperation when the two groups on Friday joined cause in Siliguri Municipal Corporation — grabbing three out of five civic boroughs — to keep the ruling Trinamool Congress at bay.
The left bagged two municipal boroughs on its own while in a third borough it backed Congress Sujay Ghatak as Chairman, sources said. The Trinamool won the remaining two boroughs. local MlA and North Bengal Development Minister Gautam Deb said the Friday’s development showed how “greed for power had the better of left Congress both of who binned their respective ideologies and hopped into each other’s beds.”
Siliguri is Bengal’s second city from where the fate of at least sixty Assembly seats is decided. At a time when the Trinamool Congress swept the recently concluded civic polls allegedly through muscle power the opposition parties including the left, Congress and even the BJP had shown a rare unity blocking rampant booth capture and rigging by the ruling outfit.
The Friday’s development is considered significant at a time when pressure groups in both the sides are advocating seat adjustment if not an electoral alliance in the next year’s Assembly elections.
“There was no alliance. Rather it was a kind of floor-coordination in which we succeeded in keeping the Trinamool at bay,” CPI(M) leader and Siliguri Mayor Asok Bhattacharya said. “We will do this wherever possible and whenever possible as we want the Trinamool Congress to go. Unless this party of mafia dons goes from Bengal there will be no peace or development in the State,” the former Bengal Minister of more than two decades said.
When asked to comment on the Friday’s “floor-coordination” PCC president Adhir Chowdhury said “one should not look much into it as it was a local affair.” On whether he did not want a future companionship with the left he said “I will not make any comments now.”
However senior Pradesh Congress leader Abdul Mannan said “there is no way to rescue Bengal from the hands of Trinamool Congress. The people had brought Parivartan to get rid of the left. Now they want Paritran (freedom) from its hands.”
Though we have ideological differences only the left and the Congress can together defeat Trinamool he maintained adding “Siliguri model is a product of popular pressure on the politicians. Irrespective of ideological differences the people want liberation from the hands of Trinamool.”