Kolkata, June 3 (IANS) West Bengal’s ruling Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) was in a state of paralysis Thursday, with the humiliating defeat in civic polls forcing Left leaders to look for the root causes.
Party bigwigs were also looking at ways to win back the support of the masses who seemed to be deserting the CPI-M in the state in large numbers. The Left Front, which is led by the CPI-M, could retain only 17 of the 54 civic bodies it controlled for the last five years.
Wednesday’s vote count in the civic polls saw the Left Front virtually swept away by a Trinamool Congress wave in most of the state’s 81 municipalities including the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC).
The CPI-M state secretariat, which meets at 5 p.m. at the Thursday, will try to find out how to win back the support of the masses, party leaders said.
The Trinamool won a massive mandate, picking up 95 of the 141 wards in KMC to unseat the Left Front, which had run the board since 2005. The Left Front got only 33 seats.
Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, who led the CPI-M campaign in KMC and some adjoining districts, was dealt a blow with his party losing a majority of seats in his constituency Jadavpore.
Two Left Front allies – Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) and West Bengal Socialist Party – have blamed corruption and the ‘wrong polices’ of the state government for the rout in the civic polls.
‘The mandate is in favour of change and that’s why we have come up with this result. After staying in power for so many years there has been corruption in many sections of the Left Front,’ RSP leader Kshiti Goswami told IANS.
