Soul search after English Bazaar defeat

Statesman News Service

MALDA, May 12: After a post-mortem to know the cause behind Mr Samarananda Roy’s defeat in English Bazaar, CPI-M workers concluded that leaders failed to anticipate the anti-CPI-M wave at a few polling stations in rural and urban areas of the constituency. They expected a decent lead for the CPI-M candidate from these areas, but the poor performance was beyond their calculation. CPI-M leaders and workers, however, thanked the voters in anti-Left English Bazaar for casting so many votes in favour of Mr Roy ~ 66,670. Though the CPI-M leaders had predicted that Congress strongholds such as Milky, Shobhanagar, Amrity and others would increase the margin in favour of the Congress candidate, Mr Krishnendu Narayan Choudhury, they were not sure how to make up the deficit in the rural belts. The CPI-M candidate bagged many votes for his “good image”. He was defeated by a mere 906 votes. In the last civic polls, the total number of votes of the Left Front was higher than the Opposition, but the Congress candidate had got a lead of 905 votes from the civic body area. The CPI-M candidate could not make up the deficit of 906 votes in the final round of counting in the English Bazaar civic body area under this Assembly segment. The party leaders and workers had ignored important factors to bag adequate votes from two areas Mahadipur ~ which is close to the Bangladesh border and Binodpur. Even in some specific polling stations of English Bazaar town, the CPI-M candidate was defeated by 100 to 400 votes in each booth owing to lack of proper monitoring and finally the CPI-M candidate was defeated by 906 votes. CPI-M workers and leaders failed to gauge that some Congress leaders would be inactive during election due to internal squabbling over the allotment of ticket to Mr Choudhury in English Bazaar. But Mr Choudhury, despite facing crisis from inside and out side the party, managed to stand tall. Mr Pranab Mukherjee and Mr Priya Ranjan Das Munshi had also played a vital role to unite the Congress leaders. Though a group of Congress workers played a nasty game against Mr Choudhury, the others extended their help because of the Ghani Khan Choudhury factor. Mr Choudhury, the former Trinamul district president, had been able to mobilise his organisational forces of the Trinamul Congress by capitalising the sentimental wave after Ghani Khan Choudhury’s death.