The much awaited alliance between Congress and CPI-M in Malda for the panchayat elections is now finally ready as Congress on Friday declared its list of candidates for the 26 seats of Malda Zilla Parishad leaving the rest 11 for a ‘strategic compromise’ with the CPI-M to restrict the ruling party, Trinamul Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party.
However, both parties refused to name it a handshake or a tieup it was rather referred by them to be ‘a compromise of seats on the basis of a particular strategy’ as there lies drifts between the two parties over the distribution of seats till date.
However, the CPI-M has not passed any negative comments over declaration of the names of the candidates by the Congress. They rather marked it as an internal matter of a political party.
Malda MP, Ms Noor said, “The alliance between Congress and CPI-M was a huge success in Malda in the assembly elections but this time no decision was taken at the state level over the matter. We still expect to have one to one candidates against the TMC and BJP here so a strategic compromise has been done in some of the seats though discussions are on some other seats too.”
According to sources, a meeting on the issue is to be organized tonight to get a solution over the 15 debated seats among which six are sure to get candidate of either party but in the rest there may be a friendly fight.
This is to be noted here that CPI-M demanded at least one seat in each block which could not be fulfilled by the Congress for local demands of the activists of the party.
It was noticed in the declared list of candidates that in some blocks like Bamongola, all the seats were left vacant whereas in some other like Chanchal-I, Kaliachak- III, Harishchandrapur- I and II no seats were left vacant.
District Secretary of CPI-M, Ambar Mitra, said, “We aim to restrict BJP and TMC. Our responsibility is to strengthen the Left Front. There may be a fight with Congress in some seats though there is enough time to withdraw our candidature. We shall act according to the situation.”