Left Front gets it right; Congress, Trinamool struggle

With the Congress-Trinamool alliance struggling to arrive at a consensus over seat-sharing, the CPM-led ruling Left Front may well end up gaining the first starter’s advantage in the West Bengal assembly polls.

Congress has demanded more than 90 seats, while Trinamool is not willing to part with more than 60.

Left Front hit the campaign trail almost immediately after announcing a joint list of candidates on Sunday.

But Mamata Banerjee and Pranab Mukherjee, leaders of Trinamool and Congress, are still nowhere close to an agreement.

Mamata has set a Friday deadline for Congress to come around and threatened to release her own list of candidates otherwise, ignoring the request of Ahmed Patel, Sonia Gandhi’s political secretary, to wait till Monday when the party chief returns from a trip to London.

The threat followed her inconclusive meeting with Pranab on Wednesday evening.

With Pranab going back to New Delhi on Thursday morning and finding himself in the midst of uproar in Rajya Sabha over a WikiLeaks expose of alleged bribery by the UPA government to win a trust vote in 2008, the possibility of immediate renewal of talks with Trinamool appears remote.