Kolkata, Feb 24 (IANS) The seat-sharing arrangement between the Left Front in West Bengal and the All India Secular Front (AISF) for the upcoming Assembly elections in West Bengal scheduled to be held later this year could not be reached even after a significant bipartite pact between AISF and the CPI-M here on Tuesday.

At the meeting which was attended by the lone AISF MLA in West Bengal Assembly, Nawsad Siddique, the Left Front Chairman in West Bengal Biman Bose, and the CPI-M Politburo member and the party’s West Bengal unit Secretary, Mohammed Salim, the seat-sharing pact was caught between AISF’s demand for 45 seats and the Left Front’s proposal to limit that to 30.

“There will be another round of meetings on this count again on Wednesday in this matter. We are hopeful that, finally, an amicable seat-sharing arrangement will be reached,” Siddique said at the end of the meeting.

Meanwhile, a Central Committee CPI-M member said that the main hurdle within the Left Front for an amicable seat-sharing arrangement with AISF is the All India Forward Bloc, which is demanding a larger share in the number of Assembly seats, considering that Congress had already backed out from any seat-sharing arrangement with the Left Front.

“If the demands of both AISF and Forward Bloc were met, in that case CPI-M would contest the upcoming state polls with a much lesser number of seats this time, after meeting the demands of two other Left Front allies, namely CPI and Revolutionary Socialist Party. But there is a limit up to which CPI-M can sacrifice its own share in the seat-sharing arrangement,” the party’s Central Committee member said.

On the other hand, AISF contends that since the Congress had already decided to walk out of any seat-sharing agreement with the Left Front for the upcoming Assembly elections in West Bengal this year, there would not be much of a problem for the Left Front to meet AISF’s demand for at least 40 seats.

“Had Congress been a party of the seat-sharing arrangement this time, their demand in the share of seats would have been much more,” an AISF leader said.

–IANS

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