This story is from March 7, 2019

Won’t sacrifice Murshidabad and Raiganj: Somen to Rahul

Won’t sacrifice Murshidabad and Raiganj: Somen to Rahul
New Delhi: An electoral understanding between Congress and Left for the coming Lok Sabha polls in West Bengal suffered a miscarriage after Pradesh Congress president Somen Mitra called on party chief Rahul Gandhi to say the state unit was not willing to part with the two seats — Raiganj and Murshidabad — that fall in the traditional Congress belt.
The understanding was to be an attempt at maximising anti-BJP and anti-Trinamool votes.

CPM had won these two seats in the 2014 polls. CPM politburo member Mohammad Selim won from Raiganj defeating Deepa Das Munshi by 1,634 votes while CPM’s Badaruddoza Khan took Murshidabad with a margin of 18,453 votes over Congress.
CPM leaders from Bengal wanted Congress to let the Left party keep these two seats while it promised not to field candidates in the four Congress seats — Malda Uttar, Malda Dakshin, Jangipur and Behrampore.
According to Congress sources, Mitra shared with the party president pre-2014 Lok Sabha poll results of Raiganj and Murshidabad to argue that the two seats very much fell within the areas of traditional Congress influence. Mitra held that the state unit would prefer to go it alone instead of “sacrificing” the two seats.
He urged Rahul to take up the matter with CPM general secretary Sitaram Yechury, two days after Yechury proposed a “no mutual contest” in six Lok Sabha seats in Bengal, including Raiganj and Murshidabad. Yechury, however, hasn’t added a word in response. He only said: “We wanted to maximise anti-BJP, anti-Trinamool polling in West Bengal. Accordingly, I had proposed a no-mutual contest in at least six seats in Bengal.”

The developments in Delhi have virtually paved the way for a quadrangular contest in Lok Sabha polls when a section of leaders in CPM and Congress was looking at common candidates in at least some seats against BJP and Trinamool.
With the Bengal Congress not so keen on having a seat-sharing deal on “piecemeal basis”, Left Front leaders have started reworking their candidate list. Front chairman Biman Bose is likely to finalise the list in its meeting on March 8.
Senior CPM leaders hinted that Left had reserved 13 seats for Congress, including the four winning seats. With Congress opting out of the seat-sharing process, the Front may consider keeping some seats for members of the broader Left family such as CPI(M-L).
According to rough estimates, CPM will field candidates in 20 seats, including Raiganj and Murshidabad, and Left candidates in 9 seats.
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