Deepa Das Munshi with Congress supporters in Raiganj on Wednesday. Picture by Nityananda Sarkar

May 21: The Left Front has lost the North Dinajpur zilla parishad to the Congress while retaining the one in South Dinajpur. In both the districts, the CPM sabhadhipatis and saha-sabhadhipatis were defeated.

The Congress has bagged 15 seats out of 24 in North Dinajpur this time, while the CPM and RSP got seven and two seats respectively. In 2003, the CPM had bagged 13 seats and the RSP and Forward Bloc one each out of the 21. The Congress had got six seats then.

This time, sabhadhipati Jyostnarani Singha and saha-sabhadhipati Ashok Singh lost to Mousumi Roy Chowdhury and Mohammed Mustafa of the Congress respectively.

The Congress leadership in the district attributed the victory to “the charisma” of Union minister from Raiganj and Pradesh Congress chief Priya Ranjan Das Munshi, the supervision of the polls his wife and MLA from Goalpokhor Deepa Das Munshi and the “disenchantment of the rural people with the ruling CPM”. Singha, however, blamed “a corrupt CPM leadership and intra-party bickering” for the debacle.

“It was a conspiracy hatched against me by Citu district secretary Subir Biswas. He had masterminded the plot just to humiliate me since I had refused to toe his line. He had plans of making money through me,” Singha, her eyes welling up, said at a news conference soon after election results were declared.

The defeated leader alleged that the CPM leadership had shifted her from Seat III of Islampur to Seat XI in Raiganj this time. In 2003, she had defeated her nearest rival by 13,000 votes. CPM candidate Manoranjan Das, who had contested from III this time, won by a margin of 4,000 votes.

CPM district secretary Bireswar Lahiri refused comment on Singha’s charges but put the result down to the “muscle and money power” of the Congress.

In South Dinajpur, CPM sabhadhipati Mohiuddin Ahmed accepted his defeat as “a people’s mandate”. He lost to his nearest rival, the RSP’s Zallur Rahman, by 2,118 votes. The CPM bagged seven seats this time against the 10 it had bagged in 2003. The RSP has raised the number of its seats from four to six. The Congress has retained one seat. The Trinamul Congress has managed to get one.