Dubai: It’s a pyrrhic success of sorts for the Congress party in Bengal, but a ‘success’ nonetheless!
For the first time in 20 years, Congress has emerged as the principal opposition force in the state. The Congress tally of 44 seats in the 294-member state assembly has brightened hopes of the party being accorded the honour of the principal opposition entity when the new assembly begins its first session.
However, the Congress leadership in Bengal is not yet ready to make much out of its newfound stature. Speaking to Gulf News from Kolkata yesterday, Omprakash Mishra, the Congress general secretary, said: “We fought this election as part of an alliance with the Left parties. Now that the alliance on the whole has fared so badly, I don’t think there is any reason to see much into these 44 seats that our party has won. Both, the Congress and its alliance partner, the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM), ought to have done much better.”
Asked to comment on the likely reasons behind this failure, Mishra said: “The alliance failed to project any one in particular as its chief ministerial candidate. That was a big mistake. Secondly, by virtue of being in the government, Trinamool Congress (TMC) had the advantage of reaching out to the masses with populist measures such as free bicycles and the Kanyashree scheme. These were areas where we lost out.”
Mishra also said that the seat-sharing arrangement with the Left was done in a hurry, which failed to appeal to voters.
In the 1996 assembly polls, Congress had won 82 seats and was the principal opposition force to the late Jyoti Basu-led Left Front dispensation in Bengal. Thereafter, with Mamata Banerjee defecting from the Congress and forming TMC, Congress was relegated to playing second-fiddle to TMC so far as the main opposition party’s status was concerned. In 2001, Congress won 26 seats after a seat-sharing arrangement with TMC, while in 2006, in the absence of any alliance among the opposition parties, the Congress tally was a dismal 21. In 2011, as part of a Mamata-led alliance, Congress won 42 seats in the state, after the TMC-Congress combine ended the Left Front’s 34-year rule at the helm in Bengal.
A steadily eroding support base and compulsions of electoral politics forced the Congress to join hands with its once-sworn enemy in the state, the CPM, for a seat-sharing arrangement for the 2016 polls. Interestingly, Congress has ended up with a better tally than the CPM, even though it had fought in far lesser number of constituencies than the Left party.
