Dipankar Bhattacharya.
Credit: PTI Photo
New Delhi: The CPI(ML)L was the talk of the town five years ago winning 12 out of 19 seats it contested in Bihar, prompting chatter that had it been given more seats compared to the underperforming Congress, a ‘Mahagathbandhan’ government would have been in place.
But this time, the CPI(ML)L, like its allies, had its worst performance winning just two out of 20 seats it contested, as party leaders tried to make sense of the enormity of the results with initial responses pointing to deletions of votes during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) and cash transfer before polls.
CPI(ML)L General Secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya said the results do not correspond to the ground reality in the state. “The results are absolutely unnatural. A government in power for two decades repeating its 2010 performance cannot be explained,” he said.
The CPI(ML)L retained Paliganj by 6,655 votes and Karakat by 2,836 votes but lost 12 other seats by a margin between 95 votes in Agiaon and 59,079 votes in Digha. The leaders were “surprised by the turnaround” in their sitting seats, which they claimed was not seen or felt on the ground during campaigning.
The party had demanded at least 30 seats during the negotiations with RJD but settled for 20, one more than what it contested in 2020. At one point, it had threatened that it had its options open when RJD was unwilling to concede to its demands.
The party also believes that the cash transfer by the Nitish Kumar government ahead of the announcement of elections as also other schemes could have tilted the balance against them.
The scare among Nitish supporters that the BJP will devour the JD(U) with inside help also might have led to the improved performance of the ruling party and it helped the BJP too, leaders said.
Party sources said there was no sign of the scale of NDA victory on the ground and their preliminary view is that the deletion of votes during the SIR. They cite the results of Gopalganj and Bhorey to claim the role of SIR. The decrease in their victory margins in Paliganj is also attributed to the vote deletions.
As the counting progressed during the day, Bhattacharya posted on 'X', “after SIR, Bihar had an electoral roll of 7.42 crore. The post-poll ECI press note puts the figure at 7,45,26,858! An increase of more than 3,00,000! Where did this 'extra 2 ab' come from? Will the EC care to explain?”
Among other Left parties in the I.N.D.I.A bloc, CPI(M) won Bibhutipur seat while losing three others and gathered 0.61% of votes. CPI, which contested nine seats that included four against ally Congress, did not win a single seat while garnering 0.76% votes.
In 2020, both won two each seats while contesting four each seats.