Trinamul marches on, CPM still paralysed

Tanmoy Bhaduri

The results of the elections to six municipalities in Bengal show that the Left is not an option, at least not yet, in spite of perceived disenchantment among sections of society over some of the policies and actions of the Mamata Banerjee government.

PLAYING  BUDDHA

The cumulative outcome suggests that the Trinamul Congress is still riding on the graph that had emerged in the last panchayat elections, crystallised in the Lok Sabha polls and peaked in the Assembly elections last year. Haldia is an exception to the pattern, where Trinamul failed to take the civic body from the Left. The Trinamul setback is being attributed largely to a backlash from many voters who saw in Trinamul MP Subhendu Adhikari's rise the emergence of another Lakshman Seth. However, the overall results show that the Left continues to be in the middle of a losing streak and has not managed to make any turnaround in the past one year, having lost in five of the six civic bodies that went to the polls on Sunday. Not only has the Left lost the Panskura and Nalhati municipalities as it did in 2007, it also failed to retain the Dhupguri civic body and, more important, the Durgapur Municipal Corporation this time.

CPM state secretariat member Mohammad Salim said of the continued defeats that the Left has been facing over the last few years: "It's true that a pattern had come up in the 2008 panchayat polls and it has been going on in successive elections…. We have not been able to make any recovery in the last one year of Mamata Banerjee's misrule."

Salim sought solace in the Haldia win. "It at least put a pause on the Trinamul's advance, particularly given the political atmosphere in which we faced the elections there,'' the CPM leader said. In the 2008 rural elections, the Left lost as many as 50 per cent of the 50,000 odd gram panchayat seats and four zilla parishads to Trinamul and the Congress, although there wasn't any alliance between the two parties.

A repeat performance unfolded in the 2010 municipal elections when, again without any alliance between Trinamul and the Congress, the Left's tally came down from 60 to 17 of the 81 civic bodies that went to the polls then. Results of this municipal poll reaffirm Trinamul's unrelenting march forward, that too without having the Congress as an electoral partner, while the Left continues to flounder in defeat. Buoyed by the success, Trinamul claimed it was toying with the idea of "going it alone" in the next elections. "We have won these civic bodies single-handed and can contest polls alone in the future," said  Mukul Roy, the Trinamul all-India general secretary. A CPM leader said although there was "discontent" among some sections of the people over certain actions of Mamata, the poll results did not reflect it.

State Congress general secretary Om Prakash Mishra said the results showed "all's not well". "It may be too early to say that there is disenchantment with Trinamul but there is little doubt that all is not well with the way they are running the show. The results indicate that the three major parties have proportionately distributed the pain and pleasure," Mishra said. Most worrying for the Left, Trinamul has shown that its earlier breach of Red Durgapur was not a flash in the pan. The Left had won the Durgapur Assembly bypoll in 2010 even after its humiliating defeat in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections. However, in the 2011 Assembly polls, the Left trailed in as many as 33 of the 43 wards of the Durgapur municipal corporation and lost both the seats from the steel township.

This time, there hasn't been much of a change in the electoral graph ' the Left has lost in 32 wards after being in power ever since the corporation was formed 15 years ago.

In Panskura, a significant positive for Trinamul has been its ability to get a majority on its own by reducing the Left's tally and wiping out the Congress that has drawn a blank this time. Earlier, Trinamul was forced to form and run the Panskura board with Congress support.