People's Democracy

FOUR Left Front candidates --- Prasanta Chatterjee, Kabiruddin Ahmad and Tarini Roy of the CPI(M) and Debabrata Biswas of the Forward Bloc --- won their way onto the Rajya Sabha in the biennial elections held at the Assembly House in Kolkata.

With the GNLF and the SUCI choosing to vote in favour of the LF candidates, the four Front candidates polled 203 votes. Chatterjee got 51 votes, Ahmad and Roy 50 each, while Biswas won 49 votes. Three LF votes were cancelled due to technical mistakes that had occurred in the ballot papers casting.

Dinesh Trivedi of the Trinamul Congress that has strength of 60 MLAs, won the fifth seat to the Rajya Sabha. The process was, however, not without the expected sordid drama as four Trinamul Congress MLAs chose to defy the whip and cast their votes in favour of Dr Arjun Sengupta who had been put up by the Congress(I).

While this bit of wayward behaviour caused a lot of heartburn in the Trinamul Congress, the cross-voting allowed the Congress(I) to gloat about the rot eating into the innards of the Trinamul faithful. (INN)