By IANS,
Kolkata : Two Left Front allies Thursday blamed corruption and “wrong polices” of the West Bengal government for the combine’s rout in the civic polls.
Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) leader Kshiti Goswami and West Bengal Socialist Party bigwig Kiranmoy Nanda, both cabinet ministers, also admitted that winds of change were sweeping the state.
“The mandate is in favour of change and that’s why we have come up with this result. After staying in power for so many years there has been corruption in many sections of the Left Front,” Goswami told IANS.
“As the CPI-M (Communist Party of India-Marxist) is the biggest partner of the Left Front, corruption has dug deeper into it than us,” added Goswami, the state PWD minister.
On the other hand, Nanda conceded that the Left Front has lost the people’s trust after being in power uninterruptedly since 1977.
“From Panchayat election in 2008 this trend against us is on. I didn’t expect a better result than this. The wrong policies of the government have taken us down. One more reason is the wrong attitude towards the people. We have lost people’s faith and trust,” Nanda, the fisheries minister, told IANS.
“After (last year’s) Lok Sabha debacle I had said let us resign and go for fresh mandate. But my proposal was rejected,” he said.
Both Goswami and Nando have been critical of the industrial policy of the state government and have earlier opposed the CPI-M on various issues.
In municipal elections held across West Bengal Sunday and whose results came out Wednesday, the Trinamool snatched the prestigious Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) from the Left and also trounced the Marxists in scores of 80 other municipalities.
The Trinamool made significant inroads into semi-urban and industrial areas long considered Marxist citadels.
The Trinamool victory is a shocker to the Left, which had hoped that its own united ranks and a division of anti-Left votes among the Trinamool and the Congress would give it the advantage it had enjoyed for decades.