A Trinamul procession with marchers carrying sticks in Toofanganj town on Monday morning. Pictures by Main Uddin Chisti

Calcutta, May 10: The Congress will come out with its own explanation of the circumstances that led to the collapse of the alliance with the Trinamul Congress when Pranab Mukherjee kicks off the party’s civic poll campaign tomorrow.

Mukherjee, the state Congress president, will hold a string of meetings with party leaders through the day before he addresses the rally at Lebutala Park, Sealdah.

Street-corner meetings were held across the city today to canvass for the rally.

Masked men with bows and arrows tail the procession

“We will have to put forth our version of the cause of the collapse to counter Mamata Banerjee’s sustained campaign against us. People should know we were not at fault,” said K. Keshava Rao, the Congress general secretary in charge of Bengal.

Rao said the alliance could have been easily worked out had “Mamataji offered 10 seats in addition to the 25” she was willing to give. “I had a string of meetings with Mamataji to request her for just 10 more seats. I did not ask her to concede to the state Congress’s demand for 51 seats. But she was rigid all through. We were left with no option but to field our candidates knowing that it would have no bearing on next year’s Assembly polls,” he added.

State Congress leaders here said Mukherjee had sought newspaper clippings on Mamata’s media briefings in which she “blamed Pranabda, without naming him, for scuttling the alliance”.

The tail of the procession breaks up and attacks a CPM office

“We did not break the alliance. It was other way round. Pranabda would drive home the point tomorrow that the Congress had tried to stitch up a deal till the last moment,” said state Congress working president Pradip Bhattacharya.

The Congress’s civic poll manifesto will mention how Mamata “dumped the Congress” and decided to “jeopardise the electoral prospects of the alliance”.

“The draft manifesto is ready. We have taken a whole page in the six-page document to dwell on how Mamata broke up the alliance by trying to di-ctate terms on the seat-sharing,” said Nityananda De, the chairman of the Congress’s campaign committee.

The manifesto will also justify the “party’s demand for 51 seats”.

A cycle is pulled out of the locked office and destroyed

On his return to Calcutta from New Delhi this evening, Mukherjee was asked about state party working president Subrata Mukherjee’s switch to Trinamul.

He said: “If somebody leaves the party, it definitely affects the organisation. But what can we do about it?”

The state Congress chief will meet the party’s four Calcutta district presidents — Pradip Ghosh, Nirbed Roy, Pranab Basu and Santosh Pathak — tomorrow morning and visit Panihati in North 24-Parganas to address party workers.

A makeshift CPM office that was ransacked on Sunday night

Mamata today again accused the Congress of acting as the “CPM’s agent to frustrate the alliance” at a meeting with her 140 Calcutta Municipal Corporation candidates. She has left one ward, 93, for ally SUCI.

In Ward 45 of Calcutta, which covers a part of Burrabazar, Trinamul workers led by its youth wing general secretary, Rajib Roy, organised a procession on Sunday night in support of Congress candidate Pathak. “We have decided to back Santoshda to protest Mamatadi’s decision to field Nirmala Pande, who is an outsider, from this ward,” said Roy.