Date:10/05/2005 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2005/05/10/stories/2005051006831300.htm

National

New alliance has no ideology: Left

Marcus Dam

KOLKATA: West Bengal's Left Front described the new alliance of anti-Left parties (except the Trinamool Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party) in the State as one that "has no ideology or principle."

Such alliances "have come and gone in the past," the chairman of the Left Front, Biman Bose, said here on Monday, a day after the United Democratic Alliance was formed.

"It is a temporary political grouping set up with an eye on the elections; it is on such occasions that such fronts come into existence," Mr. Bose told The Hindu .

"We are working towards getting more than 50 per cent of the votes [in the elections to the Kolkata Municipal Corporation on June 19] and the confidence of the people in the Left Front is increasing with time," he said.

The purpose of such an alliance was to prevent a division in the anti-Left votes, Defence Minister Pranab Mukherjee, who is also president of the Pradesh Congress Committee, said when announcing the formation of the UDA.

He and Subrata Mukherjee, who broke away from the Trinamool Congress last month to set up a forum of Trinamool rebels, are the chief architects of the new alliance which will also contest the Assembly elections next year.

"It is those parties that do not have any sense of values that suddenly get together with the hope of forming such mahajots [grand alliances]," Mr. Bose said.

State Secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Anil Biswas, described the UDA as an "opportunistic grouping of power seekers that will not last more than a few days and will pose no threat to the Left Front."