WEST BENGAL

LF Won 52% Support In Kolkata, Increases Lead In 100 Wards

B Prasant

THE latest statistics available clearly indicate the upward swing in the popular support behind the Bengal Left Front in the Kolkata metropolis. An indicator of the steady increase of the Left Front’s popularity in the urban areas, the Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) elections clearly depict how over 52.26 per cent of the total votes polled were cast in favour of the Left Front candidates. This reflects an effective increase of 10 per cent in terms of votes over the 2000 elections.

The election statistics also show that the Bengal Left Front, which won 75 wards of the KMC, could effectively increase its support base among voters in 64 of the wards it had won, as also in the 36 wards it had lost to the opposition.

In winning 52 per cent of the votes cast, the Bengal Left Front has increased the lead it had during the last Lok Sabha elections where it had polled 44.31 per cent of support in the city. The available data shows how the support base of the Bengal Left Front in Kolkata had gone on increasing in a marked manner from 2000.

OPPOSITION ISOLATED

For example, in the 1999 Lok Sabha polls, the Bengal Left Front won 35.38 per cent of the city’s votes.  During the 2000 KMC elections, the figure went up, to stand at 42.22 per cent. In the 2001 assembly elections, the figure stood at 42.22 per cent.  In the Lok Sabha polls of 2004, as we have already pointed out, the vote share of the Left Front was 44.31 per cent.

The vote share of both the principal opposition group, the Trinamul Congress, on the other hand, has, much to the chagrin of their patrons in the media, not showed any marked sign of improvement.

For example, Mamata Banerjee’s outfit got 48.59 per cent of votes in the metropolis, in the 1999 Lok Sabha elections.  In the 2000 KMC polls, it could poll only 38.50 per cent.  In the 2001 assembly elections, it won 45.60 per cent of votes.  In the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, the share again went down to 39.92 per cent.  In the 2005 KMC polls, the Trinamul Congress could poll just 25.39 per cent of votes.

The Pradesh Congress did not fare any better. In the 1999 Lok Sabha polls, the Pradesh Congress could poll 13.51 per cent. In the year 2000 KMC polls, the support went marginally up to stand at 15.94 per cent. In the 2001 assembly elections, it could win a paltry 03.55 per cent vote share. In the 2004 Lok Sabha elections, it won 12.12 per cent of the votes polled. In the 2005 KMC elections, the share of Pradesh Congress stood at around 16 per cent.

The BJP, always a political phenomenon of isolation at the margins of the political scene in Kolkata and Bengal, could poll on its own, minus the crutch of the Trinamul Congress-led alliance, just 02.32 per cent vote in the 2005 KMC polls.

The KMC elections saw the Bengal Left Front snatch 12 wards from the Trinamul-BJP combine, and three from the Pradesh Congress-led alliance. Of the 61 wards it had won in 2000, it could retain all but one. While the left Front has effectively increased its share of votes, the Trinamul Congress, which considers the posh south Kolkata as its ‘political domain’ has not only lost a number of seats but had the chagrin to witness only a few of its leaders manage to retain seats, but that too with paper-thin margins. 

Former mayor Subrata Mukherjee could retain his ward but with his winning margin coming down to just over 800 votes.  In contrast, the Left Front’s mayoral candidate, Bikash Bhattacharya won his seat on the KMC board from ward 100 with a margin of 1636 votes. The margin of victory of Ajit Panja, who was projected as the mayoral candidate of the Trinamul Congress, was just 259 votes.

MAMATA SPEAKS OF ‘GUN CULTURE’

Frustrated, and clearly at the receiving end of a massive rebuff by the Kolkata denizens, Mamata Banerjee has expectedly went on a ‘lightning-and-thunder’ campaign of sorts. Addressing a thinly attended rally in central Kolkata on June 24, Mamata threatened that ‘people” would ‘take up guns’ against the Left Front to ‘rid Kolkata and Bengal of the present misrule.’ ‘If a gun culture starts to prevail in the Kolkata political scene very soon,’ intoned the Trinamul Congress supremo, ‘know that we must not be blamed for taking up weapons.’

On being asked by the media for reactions to Mamata’s threat of ‘armed assault,’ Anil Biswas, state secretary of the Bengal CPI(M) said that the Trinamul Congress ‘always refuse take up any programmes to serve the interests of the people, nor would it think about the people as such; and thus, alienated from the populace, they take recourse to empty threats and indulge in blusterings galore.’ Such irresponsible comments, noted Biswas, would be expected to increase in frequency in the days to come, from the frustrated leadership of the Trinamul Congress as ‘it became more and more isolated from the people.’