Kolkata, March 06: As the bugle for West Bengal Assembly polls have been sounded, it has become an inevitable tryst with destiny that awaits the CPI(M)-led ruling Left Front and Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress in a watershed battle, beginning April 18.
In what is being billed as the toughest electoral battle in recent times, the polls assume great significance with no one being able to write off the possibility of a political change in the state, ruled by the Left for 34 successive years.
The six-phase polls, ending on May 10 will decide whether the Left’s strongest citadel in the country will stand the ground as it did so long, or whether the Trinamool Congress will come to power to change the state’s
political course for the first time in three-and-a-half decades.
Whatever may be the people’s verdict, sounding the D-day for one and doomsday for the other, the poll results, to be announced on May 13, will also have direct bearing on the national politics where the Congress and the Trinamool Congress are partners of the ruling United Progressive Alliance at the Centre and the Left parties in the Opposition.
In the last Assembly elections, held in 2006 the Front recorded a landslide victory, bagging 233 out of the 294 seats with the CPI(M) alone accounting for 176. The Opposition Trinamool Congress and the Congress were in tatters with only 30 and 21 seats respectively.
But it was a dramatic kaleidoscope of political events that turned the wheel fast over the next two years, putting an end to the Left hunky dory in the 2008 Panchayat polls.
Striking an alliance, the Trinamool Congress and Congress cornered about 50
per cent of the seats signaling for the first time a massive erosion in the Left vote bank in rural belt which had been the main support of the Front Government.
The results of the 2009 Lok Sabha elections came more shocking to the CPI(M) and its allies who secured only 15 out of the 42 seats with the Opposition combine of Trinamool Congress, Congress and the SUCI winning 26 seats. The BJP, fighting it out alone, won in Darjeeling.
With a perceptible anti-incumbency wind of change blowing all over, the Trinamool juggernaut rolled on with the party taking control of most of the 81 municipalities and municipal corporations, including that of Kolkata, elections for which were held last year.
This time, however, there was no electoral adjustment between the Trinamool and the Congress.
The results of a number of Assembly by-polls also went in favour of the Trinamool with major swings in votes ‘as high as seven to ten per cent’ leading to the rout of the Left.
–UNI