Chennai, Jan. 22: The CPI scoffed at the BJP’s attempt to dub the Lok Sabha elections a Vajpayee-versus-Sonia contest, saying that the polls would mainly be an “aggregation of state-level fights” between the secular and communal forces.

CPI general secretary A.B. Bardhan said BJP leaders M. Venkaiah Naidu and Pramod Mahajan “keep coining phrases every day”, but it was the number of seats won and not clever slogans that would decide who forms the next government.

Bardhan said a national-level alliance of “secular forces” was unlikely, but there “would be more or less state-specific alliances”. He said this would not be a disadvantage as every secular party “shared the same slogan to defeat the BJP and its allies”.

The alliances of secular forces would “operate in different states in different conditions” and projecting a Prime Ministerial candidate “may not be of help”, Bardhan said.

He did not think that the BJP’s hype about having a “ready Prime Minister” in Vajpayee would sway voters. “The effect is not psychological or real, but only farcical,” said Bardhan, who described Naidu’s statement that the BJP would win 300 seats on its own as a “day dream”.

The general secretary said the Left did not need “anybody else to defeat the communal forces” in Bengal, Kerala and Tripura. But “the reality” is that the “Congress is a force” in many other parts of the country, Bardhan said, clarifying that accepting the party was not the same as accepting its chief, Sonia.

He said nobody was worried about Sonia’s acceptability as a Prime Ministerial candidate, adding that there could be a repeat of 1996 when a common minimum programme was worked out among the allies post-polls to form a United Front government at the Centre.

Bardhan said the BJP was in a “panic”, going by the way it was wooing Kalyan Singh in Uttar Pradesh and Jayalalithaa here.

The CPI hopes to persuade the DMK, which is leading the Democratic Progressive Alliance in the state, to grant it four seats.

On the rival front, BJP leader Ela Ganesan confirmed today that his party’s alliance talks with the ADMK would officially commence on January 28, when Venkaiah Naidu meets Jayalalithaa.