The Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC), the oldest in the country will hold elections to determine the Mayor of Calcutta.
Needless to say that it’s a hotly contested election, not least because the party in power gets to demand the rates and bribes that need be paid by illegal builders and the transport unions in order to ply their trades. By the estimate of one Bengali newspaper, approximately Rs.52 Crores was paid as bribes by Auto Rickshaw unions alone to the KMC between 2000 and 2009.
The roads to these elections, though, haven’t been without excitement. The All India Trinamool Congress (TMC) and the Indian National Congress (INC), despite some initial foreplay never got around to touching the home-base of the pre-poll alliance that many would’ve liked. In the end it came down to seat-sharing that broke up the dalliance.
The TMC, mindful that the INC at New Delhi had gotten itself Mayawati’s support and thus didn’t “need” the TMC to prop up the UPA II Govt. decided field candidates in 115 out of the 144 wards in the CMC. Their logic was (and is) that as the more dominant out of the 2 parties in the state, it had a right to those seats. They also might have wanted the INC to see this as a show of strength as the West Bengal State Assembly elections are in 2011. The congress, for its part didn’t play ball as most of its senior members felt that they weren’t being offered a fair shot and that the terms offered were humiliating, especially since the INC had been in politics since 1887 and the TMC since the 1990s.
This of course meant that there were several “sessions” of high-powered “committees”. (Party, Working, Executive, Parliamentary, Joint-Parliamentary etc.)
It all came to naught in the end with neither party budging from its stated position.
This was good news to the dutiful folk at CPI(M) Headquarters at Alimuddin Street. The Left Front has been beleaguered of late with infighting and general dissolutionment not to mention the Maoists. Then there was the issue of them loosing several key seats including 25 to the TMC & allies in the Lok Sabha Bye-elections of 2009. There is also the matter of grooming a suitable successor to Buddhadeb Bhattacharyya and Nirupam Sen, both of whom are getting along in their years.
Whatever may be the case, the Left Front is sitting pretty at the moment as their vote-bank of transport, labor and unskilled office staff unions remains largely intact; something Mamata “didi” Bannerjee is acutely aware off. The problem lies in her decision to fight everyone on all fronts.
As far as the CMC elections go the TMC are in a good position. Even if the pre-poll alliance failed, there’s always a general joint-agreement, with the INC, to fight the Left Front to fall back upon incase the 2 parties decide to patch up after the elections, if for nothing else, just to keep the Communists out.
Whether the powers that be in each camp will allow that to happen is another matter, for politicians much like peacocks, like to strut their stuff incessantly.
