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Left Front will exist despite clashes within: Bose

Special Correspondent

’Unity not dependent on seat adjustments’

Ensure that Basanti incidents do not occur elsewhere
Leaders will meet after counting of votes

KOLKATA: The Left Front in West Bengal has been confronted by “such situations and even worse” in the past and despite that it has existed and it will do so also in the future, chairman of the Left Front Committee, Biman Bose, said here on Friday, in reference to the recent violence in Basanti in the State’s South 24 Parganas district.

Clashes there between supporters of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Revolutionary Socialist Party that claimed four lives during the panchayat polls there on Wednesday had spilled over to the next day.

The wife of a nephew of senior RSP leader and State’s Irrigation Minister, Subash Naskar, who was brought to the city from Basanti after she was critically injured in a bomb blast in her house on Thursday succumbed to injuries in a hospital here later in the night.

The clashes between the rival groups were an outcome of the failure of the CPI (M) and the RSP to arrive at an understanding over seat adjustments for the polls at the local level.

“Left Front unity is not dependant only on seat adjustments [for an election] but is premised on ideological principles,” Mr. Bose said.

“It would have been good had not the incident at Basanti happened but there has been no such violence in any other part of the State. A watch will have to be kept to ensure that such incidents do not occur elsewhere,” he added.

All the Left Front partners have a responsibility to prevent recurrence of such incidents and the CPI (M), being the largest constituent of the Left Front, has “a greater responsibility which it will live up to,” Mr Bose, who is also the Secretary of the CPI (M0’s State Committee, said.

He had spoken to senior leaders of the three other major constituents of the Left Front – the RSP, the All India Forward Bloc and the Communist Party of India – in this regard.

Leaders of the parties comprising the Left Front will meet after the counting of votes for the panchayat polls, he added.

Mr Bose appealed to all the parties concerned to ensure that peace is maintained and see that their supporters are not provoked into any action that could upset it in the third and final phase of the rural polls to be held on May 18.

“The Left Front partners should keep in mind that nothing is said or done that would be aggravate the situation and affect relations between them,” Mr. Bose said.

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