Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee might have to give up at least seven seats in her bastion in southern West Bengal to the Congress as the price of an electoral alliance. Top sources in the Congress told Business Standard that apart from the seats of the six sitting party MPs and the newly created Malda (North) constituency, the Congress is eyeing seven seats in southern Bengal. West Bengal has 42 Lok Sabha seats.
Last night, after the Trinamool Congress candidate registered a stunning victory in an Assembly seat by-election, Finance Minister and state Congress unit president Pranab Mukherjee and Banerjee clinched an in-principle agreement to fight the coming Lok Sabha elections together in Bengal. Trinamool Congress candidate Madan Mitra won the Bishnupur seat with a margin of over 30,000 votes.
While the party had initially demanded 16 seats from the Trinamool Congress chief, it is ready to settle for 14. Anything less than this will be difficult for the Congress to accept as a large section of the state leaders is pressurising the central leadership not to allow Banerjee to take an upper hand.
The Congress wants to field candidates in at least three important seats adjacent to Kolkata. These are: Howrah, Diamond Harbour and Barasat. The first two seats are currently held by the CPI(M) while Barasat has a Forward Bloc MP. Apart from these three seats, Srirampore, Krishnanagar and Birbhum are the three other seats the Congress is looking for.
Sonia Gandhi’s party wants one more seat from Banerjee in south Bengal. The state Congress leadership has even discussed a preliminary list of candidates for these seats. It may field Subhra Ghosh from Howrah, former mayor of Kolkata Subrata Mukherjee in Diamond Harbour, vice-president of Bengal Congress unit Pradip Bhattacharya in Srirampore, former MLA and local strongman Shankar Singh from Krishnanagar.
In the last few elections, results have shown that the Congress has retained its strength in large pockets of northern part of the state while the Trinamool Congress has emerged as the main opposition in the south. Through a seat-sharing arrangement, the Congress also wants to re-establish its existence in southern parts that might give the party good dividends in the next Assembly elections slated in 2012.
But a section of the Congress leaders feels that Banerjee might ask for a few seats from North Bengal, especially Malda (North), in return for seven seats in south. Just as the Congress is keen to find a foothold in south, Banerjee is equally keen to see her organisation gaining strength in northern Bengal.