Bengal polls: Left, Congress to hammer seat-sharing deal by Jan-end

Kolkata, Jan 17: Asserting that they will jointly fight the 'communal' BJP and the 'fascist' Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, the Left Front and the Congress on Sunday said that their seat-sharing arrangement for the upcoming state assembly elections will be finalised by the end of this month.

Congress state chief Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said that his party and the Left Front will hold further parleys to finalise the nitty-gritty of the deal.

Senior leaders of the two parties held talks earlier in the day over the seat-sharing agreement.

Left Front chairman Biman Bose said that though the BJP is the 'biggest enemy of the country', but given the situation in West Bengal, the fight is against both the TMC and the saffron party to save the state from communal strife and the 'binary' that is being created among the people.

'In order to defeat the communal BJP on one hand and the fascist TMC on the other, we have to fight them together as a democratic alliance,' Chowdhury, leader of the grand old party in the Lok Sabha, said at a joint press conference of the Left Front and the Congress.

He said that the parleys between his party and the Left Front are being held in a cordial and friendly atmosphere.

Endorsing Chowdhury's views, Bose said that assembly constituency-wise list of seats to be fought by each party will be finalised within January.

'We, the Left and the Congress, want to fight the elections shoulder to shoulder in order to save the people of the state and the country,' Basu said.

He said that there is no misunderstanding between the Left Front and the Congress on seat sharing.

Asked about the TMC's suggestions to the two parties to join hands with them to fight the BJP, Bose said that it was the Mamata Banerjee-led party that has given the saffron party a foot-hold in West Bengal.

'It (the suggestion) is an attempt by the TMC to mislead the people of the state,' he said.

The two parties are likely to hold a mega joint rally in Kolkata sometime soon, sources said.

Elections to the 294-member state assembly are due in April-May.

During the 2016 assembly elections, too, the two parties had stitched an alliance and bagged 76 seats.

However, during the 2019 Lok Sabha elections, the two parties had fought separately and while the Congress won two seats, the Left Front, which ruled the state from 1977-2011, drew a blank.