Calcutta, Oct. 31: Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee today endorsed Union home minister P. Chidambaram’s call to Maoists to “halt the violence” and join talks even as the CPM denied the charge of being soft on the Left extremists.

“My position is not different from Chidambaram’s. Let them stop, halt or abjure violence. No dialogue is possible without that,” the chief minister said, repeating Chidambaram’s words.

This is the first time Bhattacharjee has personally articulated the possibility of talks with the guerrillas since their bid on his life on November 2.

However, it has been the stated stand of the CPM and its government that talks are possible if the rebels lay down arms.

Asked whether he wanted the Maoists to lay down arms as a pre-condition for talks, Bhattacharjee said: “Chidambaram has a thesis on it. I am not repeating that.’’

The chief minister was apparently alluding to Chidam-baram’s comment that he did not expect the Maoists to lay down arms because of their declared policy of armed liberation struggle.

The home minister had yesterday signalled a strategy shift by offering talks on issues dear to the Maoists if they shunned violence. “The CPI (Maoist) should halt violence and the central government would persuade the state governments to talk to them on all matters, including their concerns on land acquisition, forest rights, industrialisation and development,’’ he had said.

If Chidambaram’s offer was aimed at taming his critics in the Congress who fear that his crackdown-first-deve- lopment-later policy would be counterproductive, Bhattacharjee’s comments and CPM general secretary Prakash Karat’s statement today indicated an effort to accommodate the same concerns within the Left.

Denying Chidambaram’s charge that the CPM had been indulgent about the Maoists earlier, Karat pointed out the “history of hostilities” between the Naxalites and the Marxists since the CPI(ML) was born out of the CPM’s womb in the late 1960s. Karat denied ever aligning with the Maoists to fight the Congress and pointed out that the CPM had supported the Congress-led UPA for four years since 2004, the year the CPI (Maoist) was born.

However, he also said that both the CPM and the Centre made a distinction between Pakistan-backed terrorists and home-grown Maoists. “We have always held that the Maoists have to be fought ideologically and politically apart from by firm administrative measures when they indulge in violence. The Maoists cannot be equated with the Lashkar-e-Toiba or the Jaish-e-Mohammed. The fact that the home minister has offered to talk to the Maoists if they stop the violence itself recognises this difference,” Karat said.

At a rally in Calcutta to protest price rise and the “anarchy” resulting from the “Maoist-Mamata (Banerjee) nexus”, neither Bhattacharjee nor CPM state chief Biman Bose reacted to Chidambaram’s barbs against their party and defence of partner Mamata.

Bose later said: “He (Chidambaram) had possibly mixed up today’s Maoists with the earlier Naxalites.”