BJP tries to revive mahajot, won’t fight on seats held by Cong, Trinamool

The Congress had won 82 seats in the 294-strong West Bengal Assembly during the last elections. Out of that, the party now has 56 members and the rest have defected to the Trinamool Congress.

“Our goal is to oust the Marxists from power and to do this, we should make seat adjustments and fight them,” Ghosh said. “Since the TMC is our electoral ally, I believe they will not have any problem. But it’s the Congress which will have to show how sincere they are in ousting the CPI(M) from the state,” Ghosh said.

The Mahajot concept was first floated by Trinamool leader Mamata Banerjee early this year after her candidate Jayanta Bhattacharya won a Rajya Sabha seat reportedly with the clandestine support of Congress members who cross-voted for the triumph of the Trinamool candidate. While Congress leaders like the then West Bengal Pradesh Congress Committee (WBPCC) president A.B.A.Ghani Khan Choudhury and former president Somen Mitra supported it, the idea fizzled out because of opposition from anti-Mahajot leaders like Pranab Mukherjee, the then working president Priya Ranjan Das Munshi and MLA Saugata Roy who were also backed by the High Command.

This time too the Congress has showed a lukewarm response to the idea. “The BJP is a separate party and we don’t want to have any truck with it,” Saugata Roy told The Indian Express. “We are not concerned about whether they field their candidate or not,” was Roy’s terse remark.