Dec. 25: Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee today advised “restraint” to cadres in the run-up to the 2008 rural polls.

At a closed-door meeting of the party’s North 24-Parganas unit on the eve of his Nandigram trip, he referred to Singur as a success story and said: “What we achieved in Singur couldn’t be repeated in Nandigram. The Opposition had tried to foment trouble in Singur, too, but we handled it successfully as the administration and the local party worked in sync.”

A delegate quoted him as blaming a “gap between the party and the government in Nandigram” for the trouble. “We lacked information on the Opposition build-ups. We failed to convince people about our development plans.”

Restraint, which figured in Bhattacharjee’s speech today, has been an overriding theme since Narendra Modi preached it to his cadres after winning the Gujarat polls.