Wary of the RJD-LJP’s perceived soft corners for the Congress, the Left parties are going to contest the Bihar Assembly polls together to throw the Nitish Kumar-led NDA government out of power. This is going to be the first time Bihar’s Left parties will contest an Assembly election as a united block.
“We (the Left parties) will contest 150 out of the 243 Assembly seats in the Bihar elections. The CPI has already identified 50 seats which it can win on its own strength,” said CPI general secretary A.B. Bardhan in Patna on Sunday. He said the CPI, CPI(M), CPI-ML(liberation), RSP and Forward Bloc would come together with the aim of dethroning the NDA in Bihar.
The Left parties currently have only nine MLAs in the Bihar Assembly — CPI three, CPI(M) one and the CPI(ML) five. With the contentious issue of land reforms still hot in Bihar’s rural hinterlands, all the Left parties hope to win a significant number of seats in the October-November Assembly polls. Mr Bardhan said talks were in progress among the Left parties for building a common platform.
On the question of an alliance with the RJD-LJP, two of Bihar’s main Opposition parties that have solidified their alliance lately, Mr Bardhan was cagey and said the CPI was yet to reach any final decision. At the CPI national executive in New Delhi on May 13, the party had decided not to enter into an alliance with Lalu Prasad Yadav’s RJD for the Bihar polls because of the former railway minister’s unreliability as an anti-Congress political entity and also due to the RJD’s links with feudal landlords in Bihar.
In the 2005 Bihar Assembly polls, the Left was divided between the RJD and the LJP, which had fought separately. While the CPM had stayed with the RJD, the CPI fought against it as part of a front comprising LJP and other smaller Left parties.