Sept. 24: The Forward Bloc today requested MLA Udayan Guha to reconsider his move to step down from party posts.

The leadership, sources said, was concerned about "rumours" that Guha could quit the Bloc, which would leave the Bloc on the mat in Cooch Behar, the last outpost of the party.

Guha resigned as the party's Cooch Behar district secretary and a member of the state secretariat yesterday.

The Bloc leadership has lined up a one-to-one meeting between Guha and Ashok Ghosh, the nonagenarian state secretary, early next week.

Bloc state secretariat member Jayanta Roy said in Calcutta today that the meeting was planned after Ghosh spoke to Guha in the aftermath of his decision to quit the two party posts.

"There is no denying the fact that Udayan has grievances over some internal matters of the party. It appears that this might have prompted him to quit the party's key posts. But we believe the problems will be sorted out once he meets Ashokda in Calcutta early next week," Roy said.

According to Roy, Guha had expressed resentment at organisational matters when he participated in the Bloc's two-day state committee meeting in Calcutta on September 21-22.

Asked to elaborate, a Bloc source said Guha wanted a change in the leadership before next year's Assembly polls because of Ghosh's advanced age and ailments. Guha is also learnt to be lobbying hard for Debabrata Biswas, the Bloc general secretary, to replace Ghosh. But the leadership is yet to act on his suggestion.

"This appears to be one of Udayan's main grievances," a secretariat member said.

The word in Trinamul circles is that Guha is having "secret negotiations" with the ruling party after being told that he could be given a key post in the North Bengal Development Board if he quit the Bloc and joined Mamata Banerjee's party. It was learnt that Trinamul was trying to wean away the Bloc MLA from Goalpokhar in North Dinajpur, Imran Ali Ramz (Victor).

Imran is the son of former Bloc MLA Ramjan Ali, who was murdered in the MLA Hostel on Kyd Street by his wife Taulat Sultana in November 1994. She is serving a life term. After Ramzan's death, Imran's uncle Hafiz Alam Sairani had got elected from Goalpokhar and later became a minister in the Left cabinet.

The Bloc leadership's desperate attempt to stop Guha from distancing himself from the party is because Cooch Behar, from where he is an MLA, is considered the last outpost of the party. Four of the Bloc's 11 MLAs are from Cooch Behar. Guha is said to have played a pivotal role in preventing chinks in the organisation after the change of guard in the state in 2011.