Bengal Opposition camaraderie gets off to bad start
Predictably, despite wanting to fight the Left Front in West Bengal together so that anti-Left votes are not divided, the Trinamool Congress and the Congress have got off to a bitter start when it has come to seat sharing in the Lok Sabha polls.
ARM TWISTING by Mamata Banerjee was something that some senior leaders in the West Bengal Congress were apprehending and their fears are coming true. Despite Mamata Banerjee and West Bengal Pradesh Congress President Pranab Mukherjee’s announcement that the Trinamool Congress and the Congress would join hands to fight the Left Front, the electoral pact at the state level, which is yet to be formalised at the central level, got off to a bitter start.
The bickering as expected is over seat sharing for the ensuing Lok Sabha polls. State Congress leaders have accused the Trinamool Congress of offering it seats which the party is unlikely to win because they are traditional Left bastions. Six of the seven seats Mamata has offered to the Congress are known to be Left strongholds and none of the then are in south Bengal — the Trinamool’s area of strength.
While seat sharing between the two prospective allies is not final, the offer being bandied about by the Trinamool Congress has not gone down too well with state Congress leaders including those like Subrata Mukherjee who have been favouring an electoral tie up with Mamata’s party.
Soon after deciding to tie up for the Lok Sabha polls the Congress had submitted its demand for 18 seats whereas Trinamool Congress had offered 12. After some haggling Mamata agreed to offer two more seats to the Congress but the ones on offer was not to the Congress’s liking.
On Sunday after the two parties agreed to team up against the Left the Congress apart from retaining the six seats it won in the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, was offered seven seats by the Trinamool Congress. These were Purulia, Bankura, Burdwan-Durgapur, Jalpaiguri, Arambagh, Malda and Birbhum. The Congress already has MPs from Raiganj, Malda, Behrampore, Jangipur, Murshidabad and Darjeeling.
The Congress list included Krishnagar, Serampore, Diamond Harbour, Jadavpur and Kolkata North. These were in addition to the six seats it has in its kitty and the seven Trinamool Congress had offered.
State Congress leaders who are in New Delhi have voiced their protest and complained to the AICC general secretary in charge of Bengal, K. Keshava Rao. Pranab Mukherjee was said to have taken up the issue Congress president Sonia Gandhi.
Now it waits to be seen whether seat sharing is amicably sorted out between the two parties and when Mamata Banerjee meets Sonia Gandhi for the official seal on an electoral pact. Given Mamata’s unpredictability it will not be a major surprise if her party decides to go it alone at the last minute.
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