KOLKATA: Despite CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury strongly denying the possibility of an alliance with the Congress for the West Bengal Assembly polls, CPM Central Committee member and former minister Goutam Deb on Tuesday again spoke about the need for a broad electoral alliance minus the BJP to fight the ruling TMC.
“How did the Congress-led government at the Centre survive for four-and-a-half-years?” Deb said, recalling the Left’s support to the UPA-I. When reminded about the political resolution at the CPM Party Congress to maintain equal distance with the Congress and BJP, he remarked, “Let elections come, then you will see. The Party Congress is over. You will see what happens in November.”
The CPM would hold a plenum here in November, where it would chalk out its tactical line in West Bengal for the Assembly polls and try to rope in other smaller Left parties such as the CPI(ML) Liberation and SUCI, which are not part of the Left Front in the state.
Deb even asked TMC Rajya Sabha MP and former national secretary Mukul Roy, now sidelined in his party, and his followers, including suspended MLAs Shilbhadra Datta and Shiuli Saha, to engineer more splits in the ruling party.
Asked whether Mukul and his followers would be part of the alliance against the Trinamool Congress, he replied, “There is nothing called no in politics. Doors are open for all in politics.”
“We (Left Front), at present, are not in a position to defeat the Trinamool Congress by contesting the elections alone. A broad-based alliance with other like-minded secular and democratic parties is needed,” Deb had said on June 19.