Biman Bose

Calcutta, May 5: Left Front chairman Biman Bose today admitted to disunity among the allies over seat-sharing for the panchayat polls and sounded worried about its likely fallout.

Addressing the media, Bose, also the CPM state secre- tary, highlighted the “infor- mal alliance” of the Trinamul Congress, Congress and other Opposition parties at the grassroots level despite Mamata Banerjee’s refusal in public to join hands with Sonia Gandhi’s party.

But he spent more time talking of the lack of understanding among the Left allies.

The RSP and the Forward Bloc had complained that a “big brotherly” CPM was encroaching on their strongholds and intimidating their candidates.

“The people will vote for the front. But I don’t know what the margin of our victory will be,” Bose said, almost echoing Jyoti Basu’s worries.

Bose conceded that the allies would fight each other in at least 5,000 seats. Elections will be held for 51,064 seats in the three-tier panchayat.

The number of “dummy candidates” the partners have fielded to “mar one another’s prospects” can be ascertained only after the first two phases, Bose added.

However, he dismissed the contention of RSP and Bloc leaders that an understanding could not be achieved in 80 to 85 per cent of the seats and insisted that the situation was better than five years ago.

Bose claimed that the RSP and the Bloc had been allowed to field candidates in more seats this year despite a 15 per cent slash in total seats.

The CPM’s decision to drop the mention of Nandigram and play down the land acquisition row in the front poll manifesto to avoid acrimony among the allies has not paid off.

“We finalised the draft by incorporating the allies’ amendments and hoped for total unity in return. But it didn’t happen since the allies were bent on proving their increasing strength by insisting for more seats,’’ Bose said.