Chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee leaves after the CPM meeting in Calcutta on Thursday evening. (Amit Datta)

Calcutta, Nov. 12: The CPM today dismissed the possibility of early Assembly elections after home minister P. Chidambaram yesterday asked the Left front to respond to Mamata Banerjee’s call to quit.

The demand for snap polls has also come from Kiranmoy Nanda, a minister in the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government and a leader of the Bengal Socialist Party, a CPM partner.

But speaking to TV channels today, industries minister Nirupam Sen said: “It is not feasible to bring the polls forward on the basis of 10 byelection results. Whatever the views of some partners, there is no question of dissolution (of the Assembly). This is not the time for it (dissolution). There are a lot of problems and a lot of work has to be done. The Maoists have to be tackled administratively. Elections will take place in due time.... I do not think the chief minister is beleaguered.”

Sen also appeared to discount the possibility of further changes in government.

After the CPM state secretariat met this evening, Sen again said: “There is no plan to advance the polls as it would be held in due time. We have no such agenda now since our party is run by collective decision and not centred around an individual. We have already made necessary changes in the government recently.”

Elections are due in the state in 2011.

Nanda, the state fisheries minister, had asked the front to seek a fresh mandate in April 2010, a year ahead of schedule.

Today, he repeated that he was not convinced about elections in 2011.

“I want to say again that the Left Front should immediately take the decision to seek fresh elections. We have lost the right to rule after the drubbing in the Assembly bypolls,” he said, demanding a discussion in the front on the matter.

RSP minister Kshiti Goswami seemed to agree. “With such results we should sit in the Opposition benches. Let’s see what the Left front says about calling early elections,” he said.

Chief minister Bhattacharjee kept mum, neither commenting on Nanda’s demand nor Chidambaram’s remark about the Marxists’ earlier softness towards Maoists.

It was left for Sen to respond, who said: “Whatever Chidambaram said was because of his political compulsions in a coalition government. Otherwise, he knows the ground reality in junglemahal, about the Trinamul Congress-Maoist nexus. We retained Jhargram Lok Sabha constituency for long and didn’t need Maoist support for it.”

Many CPM leaders seemed almost resigned to the “anti-Left wave” sweeping across the state.

“It’s not any more confined to any particular social group as people of all strata are now asking for change,” said a senior CPM leader.

They said neither Bhattacharjee’s call for a “turnaround”, nor the party’s shrill campaign against the Mamata-Maoist nexus evoked a response, even from the urban middle class. “It didn’t work,” said a former CPM MP.

Many of them blamed the voters.

“The people voted for a rudderless change. It’s really disappointing that people supported the Opposition despite the soaring prices for which the Congress-led Centre was responsible. We have to wait for people to realise the dangers,’’ said Amitabha Nandi, a former CPM MP from Dumdum.

He admitted that a “sizeable section of Left voters, particularly those of vacillating mind” had shifted their allegiance this time.