KOLKATA: Signaling ruling Left Front's crumbling hold on rural Bengal, its main support base for decades, the alliance has lost half of the gram panchayat seats in the three-tier panchayat elections held ahead of next year's Lok Sabha polls.
Cashing in on the disunity in the Left ranks and the controversy over farm land acquisition for industry, Trinamool Congress, Congress and smaller opposition parties, snatched away 1479 gram panchayats, the village level administrative bodies, out of a total of 3220 spread over 17 districts or half of the GPs.
The Left Front won 1597 GPs, while the fate of 118 GPs was still undecided. Also, in the lowest tier of rural administration, the panchayat samitis, the opposition severely dented the Left's control, claiming 131 samitis while the Front won 189 samitis out of 329. In the last panchayat polls in 2003, the Left Front had won an overwhelming majority of gram panchayats and panchayat samitis, besides the zilla parishads.
Left Front leader CPI (M) has rarely faced such a drubbing by Trinamool Congress, the largest opposition party, particularly in East Midnapore district where trouble-torn Nandigram is located and at Singur in Hooghly, the site of the Tata Motors small car plant, besides South and North 24 Parganas districts.
The areas where the Left Front suffered a beating included those where the Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee government wished to showcase its industrial prowess and saw protests from farmers over land acquisition for setting up industrial projects.
The CPI(M) conceded some minorities deserted it in panchayat polls and said its poor show in the elections could not be blamed on the party-led West Bengal government's industrialization policy.
"Something must have been wanting as reflected in the three-tier panchayat polls," CPI(M) state secretary Biman Bose said, adding "We will have to analyse whether there was any failure in implementing the development work in villages or there was any display of one-upmanship by our men."
He claimed the new industrialization policy, which saw the Left Front government was aggressively wooing business houses in investing in the state, had not backfired. "Had this was so, then we would not have won in Purulia, West Midnapore and Burdwan where large tracts of land have been acquired for setting up industries," Bose told reporters.
Admitting that the party failed in making people of East Midnapore, of which Nandigram was a part, to understand the need for industrialization, he said "such things happen when something new thing is brought in."
Bose drew a parallel between the abolition of sati and the state's industrialization drive, saying "Derozio's 'Young Bengal' faced tremendous opposition while trying to stop sati as it was new to society. We are facing a similar situation and the fruits of our endeavor will be seen later."
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