The Congress on Thursday formally announced its alliance with the Left Front in West Bengal for the upcoming Assembly elections. West Bengal State Congress president Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said the party’s ‘high command’ had given its go-ahead for the tie-up.
Elections to the West Bengal Assembly is scheduled for April-May next year, along with Tamil Nadu, Assam, Kerala and Puducherry.
Addressing a press conference at his residence in Delhi, Mr. Chowdhury said the details of the seat-sharing are yet to be worked out between the two sides, but the Congress would like its fair share to take on the Trinamool Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Of the 294 Assembly seats, the Congress had contested in 90 in the 2016 polls as part of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led alliance and won 44 seats to become the second largest party. However, since then several MLAs had left the party, many of them joining the Trinamool Congress.
Commenting on the BJP’s political rise in the State and its Mission Bengal to win more than 200 seats, Mr Chowdhury called it “an exaggeration and wild imagination”.
The Congress leader blamed West Bengal Chief Minister and Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee for bringing the BJP into the State and asked her apologise to the minority community. He said the strong arm tactics used by the Mamata Banerjee government and Trinamool to “terrorise and break secular Opposition parties” also helped the BJP expand in the State.
“The media is thinking that only two forces, the BJP and the TMC, are contesting. This is entirely wrong. Common people are tired with the politics of daily bickering and abuses between the two sides. People of Bengal want to get rid of this kind of politics and the third force of Congress-Left can be a viable alternative... We are going ahead with the belief that we will come to power by defeating these two forces,” Mr. Chowdhury said when asked about the electoral prospects of the Congress-Left combine.
Asked about BJP charge that Congress and the Left resort to kushti (wrestling) and dosti (friendship) in Bengal, he said,“It can happen. There is nothing unusual”.
Thursday’s announcement by the Congress leader follows an in-principle approval given by the central committee of the CPI (M) – the party’s highest executive body – to go for an alliance with the Congress in Bengal.