TMC slams CPI(M) over Salim–Kabir meet, flags possible pre-poll alliance

Kolkata: The Trinamool Congress on Thursday lashed out at the Communist Party of India (Marxist) after the leftist party’s West Bengal state secretary, Mohammed Salim, had a meeting with Humayun Kabir, a member of the legislative assembly, whom Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s party recently suspended for making controversial comments with communal overtones.

Salim’s meeting with Kabir fuelled speculation about an alliance between the CPI(M) and the Janata Unnayan Party (JUP), a new political outfit floated by the former TMC leader after the ruling party had suspended him for launching a campaign to build a ‘Babri Mosque’ in Murshidabad.

“The CPI(M) has become politically bankrupt and is now going around with a begging bowl for a pre-poll alliance, as the party neither has any member in the present state legislative assembly, nor can it contest in all the 294 constituencies on its own in the forthcoming elections,” TMC leader Kunal Ghosh said.  

The TMC, led by Mamata Banerjee, had defeated the CPI(M)-led Left Front in the 2011 West Bengal assembly elections, ending the 34-year-long rule of the leftist parties in the state. An agitation against the Left Front government’s move to acquire agricultural land to set up industrial units in Nandigram and Singur had catapulted the TMC to power in 2011.

 The TMC then retained power in the 2016 and 2021 elections too.

 The CPI(M) and its allies over the past 14 years failed to regain the political space it lost to the TMC. The party at present neither has any MLA in West Bengal, nor any MP in the Lok Sabha from West Bengal. 

 The CPI (M)’s vote percentage too nosedived from 33.1% in 2009 to 6.3% in 2019 and to 5.7% in 2024, when the party failed to win any Lok Sabha seat from the state.

 “I have urged the CPI(M) to finalise the alliance by February 15,” Kabir told journalists, adding that his JUP might also have a tie-up with All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Muslimeen, led by Asaduddin Owaisi, in West Bengal for the upcoming polls.

 Salim, however, said that he had met Kabir only to know from him what he had been planning to do.