Calcutta, Nov. 6: CPM leaders today said they did not expect Jyoti Basu’s desperate appeal to Congress supporters to cut much ice when voting for 10 Assembly bypolls takes place tomorrow.

They said they would be “more than happy” if the Left Front succeeded in retaining the north Bengal seats of Kalchini and Rajganj “even with a slender margin”.

For them, even the “prestige fight” in Belgachhia East, given the import of the late Subhas Chakraborty’s legacy, is almost lost. Basu’s appeal, therefore, would have been inspired as much by desperation as arithmetic.

In principle, a split in Congress votes can bail the Left out in the three seats, where the Opposition made deep inroads between the 2006 Assembly polls and the May 2009 Lok Sabha elections. The Left can also theoretically hope that the BJP might just play saviour, especially in the two north Bengal seats, by grabbing a slice of the Congress-Trinamul votes. (See chart)

In at least half the poll-bound seats, the Congress won moderate to good vote shares in the 2006 elections. It polled 41.73 per cent in Kalchini and 10.72 per cent in Rajganj, and 24.99 per cent in Trinamul-held Serampore.

In Calcutta, the Congress had bagged 8.20 per cent votes in Alipore and a game-changing 5.01 per cent in Belgachhia East. It was the Congress’s 9,855 votes that had allowed Chakraborty to scrape through by just 1,749 votes in what was once his pocket borough.

In the 2009 general election, however, with the Congress and Trinamul tying up, the Opposition combine took a lead of 28,754 votes from this Assembly seat, now divided among three parliamentary constituencies.

CPM leaders were pessimistic about sections of Congress voters saving the day for Subhas’s wife Ramala, the current CPM candidate.

“There is a difference between an outpouring of popular emotions during Subhasda’s last journey and the voters’ choice on the day of polling. We had already lost ground (in the constituency) when he was alive,” a CPM secretariat member said.

Ramala herself does not seem to be counting too much on voter sympathy. She was the first to ask Congress voters for support before Basu lent his authority to the appeal.

The Left faces tough battles in Kalchini and Rajganj, too, despite having comfortably retained the corresponding Lok Sabha constituencies, Alipurduar and Jalpaiguri, in 2009.

The RSP, which held Kalchini, needs the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha and ally BJP, as well as the Adivasi Vikas Parishad, to split Opposition votes.

The Morcha is supporting an Independent against the RSP in Kalchini but has backed the Congress-Trinamul against the CPM in Rajganj, making the battle tougher and offering Trinamul a chance to open its account in north Bengal.

One other point favouring the Opposition is that Rajganj includes 14 wards of Siliguri town, where the Congress-Trinamul combine recently wrested the civic body.

The Left will be looking to the BJP in both Kalchini and Rajganj. The BJP had won 46,667 votes from Kalchini in 2009, which was more than the Left’s tally and almost double the Trinamul’s.

In Rajganj, the BJP’s 8,787 votes were nearly twice the margin the Left had gained from the segment. Overall, the BJP’s 9.15 per cent votes from the Jalpaiguri Lok Sabha seat appeared to have played spoilsport for the Opposition combine in the general election.

Even in Belgachhia East, the BJP had polled 25,269 votes in the Lok Sabha polls.

But whether the Opposition vote splits or not, the Left does not seriously hope to challenge the Trinamul in its south Bengal bases, where the ruling front has taken a drubbing in every recent election, from panchayat to Parliament.