By IANS,
Kolkata : The ruling Left Front partners in West Bengal Monday said the electoral tie-up between the Congress and the Trinamool Congress in the forthcoming Lok Sabha polls would pose a formidable challenge to the communists parties who have been ruling the state uninterrupted since 1977.
“It’ll definitely be a tough challenge for all the Left Front partners in the coming election if the Congress and Trinamool form an alliance and fight unitedly against the communists in the Lok Sabha election,” Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) central committee member Binoy Konar told IANS Monday.
However, he said the alliance would not be very prestigious for the Congress as far as the party’s image was concerned in West Bengal.
West Bengal’s opposition Trinamool Congress and the Congress Sunday decided that they would fight the Lok Sabha elections together against the state’s ruling Left Front.
The decision was taken after a closed door meeting between state Congress president Pranab Mukherjee and Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee at a south Kolkata guesthouse Sunday night.
However, the two leaders said the final contours of the alliance including the number of seats to be contested by each party would be decided in the coming days after further talks.
CPI-M patriarch Jyoti Basu had earlier said that it would be a tough contest for the communists if there is an alliance between the Congress and Trinamool in West Bengal.
“The CPI-M might lose some seats in the coming Lok Sabha election if the Congress-Trinamool alliance finally materialises,” he had said days before the two parties finalised their electoral tie-up.
Conceding that the alliance would make the going tough for the Left Front partners, Communist Party of India (CPI) state secretary Manju Kumar Majumdar told IANS: “In West Bengal almost 50 percent of the voters are anti-communist and the rest are for the Left Front. And now, if this significant percentage of votes goes against us, it’ll be a difficult election for the Left Front.”
“I believe that people of West Bengal would take the right decision and exercise their democratic rights accordingly. They will not do anything which will go against our national interest,” he said.
“The success of this electoral alliance will depend on the political programmes and ideologies of both the parties,” Majumdar added.