Karat

Calcutta, July 3: Prakash Karat may not want Mulayam Singh Yadav to prop up the Manmohan Singh government if the Left withdraws support over the nuclear deal, but many of his Bengal comrades would be relieved to see the UPA government survive.

The reason: they don’t want early polls after the setbacks in the panchayat and municipal elections.

“We can’t afford early Lok Sabha polls after the beating we took in the panchayat and municipal elections. The party’s state leadership, too, will like to have some time to repair the damage,’’ said a CPM state committee member.

The party cannot go for polls over the nuclear deal since it “hardly concerns common people”. “Prakash Karat’s firm position on this has landed us in a fix. If Mulayam saves the government as well as the deal, it will embarrass us. But it will also give us some time to prepare for the polls on popular planks, like price rise,’’ he added.

But leaders like Benoy Konar sounded unfazed. “Let Mulayam decide his mind. But we won’t mind if early poll becomes inevitable to stop the nuclear deal,” he said.

The Left Front lost four municipalities, while Trinamul and the Congress bagged four each in the results of the elections to 13 civic bodies declared yesterday. In May, the front had lost four zilla parishads to the Opposition, many panchayat samitis and around half the gram panchayats.

The CPM state secretariat will hold a preliminary review of the setbacks tomorrow. District leaders have been asked to submit their reports soon.

Party general secretary Karat and his CPI counterpart A.B. Bardhan will be in the city on Saturday on the occasion of communist veteran Hiren Mukherjee’s birth anniversary. The CPM state leadership is likely to meet Karat separately, sources said.

Leaders from the districts where the CPM fared poorly in the rural and civic polls fear that the setbacks could hurt the Left’s chances in around 20 parliamentary seats. However, the leadership is yet to come out with its assessment.

“The poll results indicate some erosion in our support and a warning from voters. But it is too early to see any tangible voting patterns except the emergence of an Opposition grand alliance which was missing in the last Lok Sabha and Assembly polls,’’ said state committee member Rabin Deb.

The timing and the issues on which the general elections will be contested are more important, Deb said.

He added that the party also had “to take care of the Congress-Trinamul-BJP equations” if the UPA government survived. “After all, the BJP had around 5 per cent vote in Bengal. This makes a lot of difference to the outcome.”

He insisted the front had received 58 per cent of the votes in the municipal polls.

The CPM had won 40 of the 60 urban Assembly segments, or 43 per cent of the votes in the region, in the 2004 Lok Sabha polls. This was a leap from 17 seats and 37 per cent in 1999.