Agartala, April 15: Chastened by the comprehensive electoral rout, the Forward Bloc in Tripura, which contested the Assembly polls separately, has finally decided to return to the Left Front fold.

Last Saturday, the state president of Forward Bloc, Brajagopal Roy, had expressed the party’s desire to remain within the fold of the Left Front.

He wrote to the Front expressing his desire to continue as its member. Left Front convenor and CPM MP Khagen Das had earlier warned the Forward Bloc on April 7 that unless they made their position clear, the Front would close its doors on the party and continue with its programmes without its erstwhile partner.

Unnerved by the threat, Forward Bloc state secretary Shyamal Roy convened a meeting of the party’s state committee on April 11 to decide the issue.

Sources in the Bloc said a majority of the members of the state committee supported the decision to continue with the Left Front, criticising the president and secretary for contesting the polls separately without adequate preparation. Contradictory statements were, however, made by Roy. He said, “Even while contesting polls separately we had made it clear that we were not parting with the Front and that has been clearly stated in my letter”.

The Left Front convenor expressed his satisfaction over the issue but refused to elaborate.

He asserted that the Bloc would take part in the programmes of the Front, as always. The feud involving the CPM, the dominant partner of the Front, and the Bloc had started over the seat-sharing issue. The Bloc had demanded three seats in the Assembly polls instead of the one that has been allotted to it since 1978.

But the CPM stood its ground and refused to allot more than one seat to the Forward Bloc.

The Bloc put up 12 candidates across West, North and Dhalai districts of the state but lost the security deposits in all of them.

The CPM claimed it should have won the Badharghat seat of Agartala and Kamalpur town in Dhalai district, and blamed the Bloc for their failure. “We lost two seats because of them. The Forward Bloc should realise that it simply cannot survive in politics without being in the Front,” said CPM spokesman Gautam Das.