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Seat adjustments within Left Front still elusive

Special Correspondent

Kolkata: Seat adjustments for the coming panchayat elections in West Bengal between the constituents of the Left Front remain elusive in certain places at the gram panchayat level and efforts are on to ensure greater unity among the parties concerned in these areas, Biman Bose, chairman of the Left Front Committee, said here on Monday.

Unity among the Left Front partners is imperative if “the anti-Left mahajot [grand alliance] that has emerged in rural West Bengal with an eye to the panchayat elections” is to be defeated, he said.

The three-phase polls will be held on May 11, 14 and 18.

There is still time and opportunity for the parties to take a more “realistic” stock of the situation that calls for a strengthening of unity among the Left parties at a time when imperialist powers like the United States are putting greater pressure on India. Had it not been for the Left parties, the country would have succumbed tamely to such imperialistic designs, Mr Bose said.

“The reactionary, ultra-right and extreme-Left forces that had banded together as part of a conspiracy hatched by forces having national and even international connections had singled out the Communist Party of India (Marxist) as the main enemy as they are aware that if it is weakened the Left Front is weakened,” Mr Bose, who is also Secretary of the CPI(M)’s State Committee, said. “What is needed is the strengthening of Left unity and better understanding to foil such designs,” he said.

On the question of seat adjustments for the coming polls he said that though there have been some shortcomings, the Left Front has been more successful in ensuring unanimity of choice than it was in the last rural polls in 2003. What has contributed to the problem this time around is that the number of gram panchayat seats has come down by 15 per cent, Mr Bose said.

Not all the Left constituents are finding it easy to reconcile to the fact that a decrease in the number of seats necessitates that the parties concerned should all be contesting in fewer seats than they had done in the last polls, he pointed out.

The CPI(M) and the Communist Party of India will be contesting fewer seats in the three-tier polls than they had in 2003 though that is not the case for the other two major constituents — the Revolutionary Socialist Party and the All India Forward Bloc, Mr Bose noted.

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