Kolkata, Feb 16 (IANS) All India Forward Bloc is set to become the sole constituent of the West Bengal Left Front, opposing any seat-sharing arrangement between the CPI(M)-led Left Front and All India Secular Front (AISF) for the Assembly elections in the state.

The majority in the state committee of the Forward Bloc has agreed to oppose any proposal for the Left Front’s seat-sharing arrangement with AISF at the next meeting, before the elections, to finalise the internal seat-sharing formula within the front.

The decision to oppose any seat-sharing arrangement with AISF was ratified at the two-day meeting of the Forward Bloc’s state committee that concluded on Sunday night.

In the meeting, it was also decided that this time, the Forward Bloc leadership will settle for fewer than 32 seats in a 294-seat West Bengal Assembly. “For 34 years, from 1977 to 2011, the Left Front has ruled in West Bengal. The people still have faith in the Left Front as an individual identity. So, the Left Front should contest independently this time,” said Forward Bloc’s state secretary in West Bengal, Naren Chattopadhyay.

Incidentally, Forward Bloc has been the only constituent of the Left Front to oppose the Left Front’s seat-sharing arrangement with Congress that began in the 2016 Assembly polls and continued till the 2024 Lok Sabha election.

The Forward Bloc leadership was also against the Left Front being a part of “Sanjukta Morcha (United Front) for the 2021 West Bengal polls, where the other partners were Congress and AISF.

Congress leadership has already announced that the party will independently contest all 294 Assembly constituencies in the state in 2026 and will not have any understanding with other political forces, Left Front or Trinamool Congress.

Meanwhile, AISF leadership has also made it clear to the Left Front, especially CPI(M), that it would not settle for less than 40 seats of its choice this time. The Left Front’s final offer so far is 32 for AISF, and that too is not necessarily the seats of AISF’s first choice.

AISF’s logic behind not settling for less than 50 seats is that had Congress been a party to the seat-sharing arrangement this time, the demand for a share of seats would have been much more.

CPI(M)’s counter-logic is that by the same formula of Congress not being a part of the arrangement, the other allies in the Left Front, namely CPI, Revolutionary Socialist Party, and All India Forward Bloc, are also demanding more seats this time.

–IANS

src/dpb