Trinamool Congress chairperson and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee has said that the party has literally wiped out the Left in its bastions with her party managing to emerge with flying colours fighting all odds, conspiracies and machinations of different political parties. She said that her party has passed an agnipariksha (baptism by fire).
“This time we have fought it all alone,” she said, adding that while the Congress, the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and the Bharatiya Janata Party – “all worked mostly together... the results have proved again that the mandate of the Ma-Maati Manush [Mother-Earth-People] has clearly been on our side and helped us to pass the agnipariksha of people’s confidence and trust.”
Revelling at the rural polls’ results on her social networking site, the TMC supremo said: “The panchayat election results are almost out. The mandate of the people is overwhelmingly in our favour.”
Political commentators have seen this round of rural polls as a testing ground for the Lok Sabha polls scheduled next year. This was also the first major elections since the TMC snapped its ties with its 2011 Assembly poll ally, the Congress.
Ms. Banerjee said that she was happy with the results in the Jangalmahal area. “We have received 100 per cent mandate,” she said. However, it is the result in the erstwhile Left bastions that seemed to have cheered Ms. Banerjee the most.
“Trinamool Congress has literally wiped out the Left in almost all their strong bastions in Burdwan, Birbhum, Paschim Midnapore, Purba Midnapore, Coochbehar, Hooghly, Bankura, Purulia and Dakshin Dinajpur.”
Out of 17 zilla parishads, (the highest rung in the three-tier panchayat elections) the Trinamool Congress alone has clearly swept 13 while two others remain hung. One each had gone to the Left and Congress, Ms. Banerjee noted.
Even as the Opposition complained of violence, intimidation and wrongdoings, which continued into the counting process, Ms. Banerjee said the highest number of nominations were filed this time – 1.97 lakh in all compared to 1.4 lakh in 2008, when the last rural polls were held.