UP polls: Left parties to field candidates on a limited number of seats

The Left parties may field candidates on a limited number of seats in Uttar Pradesh to avoid a division in anti-BJP votes as such a split would be to the disadvantage of the Opposition parties, including the Congress and the Bahujan Samaj Party (BSP).

The Communist Party of India (CPI) and the Communist Part of India (Marxist), the two main players among the Left components in the state, will meet shortly to shortlist the seats and candidates for the UP polls. In 2017, half-a-dozen Left parties together contested 140 seats in UP and drew a blank.

With their efforts to be a part of an anti-BJP alliance led by the Samajwadi Party (SP) not having succeeded, these Left parties have now decided to go it alone with their own tie-ups in the UP polls.

CPI state secretary Girish said the Left parties had decided to go it alone after other political parties did not respond to their overtures for the anti-BJP alliance.

“We contacted almost all main political parties, including the SP, and even wrote letters to them expressing our willingness to tie up with them to defeat the BJP in UP,” he said.

“But they did not respond after which we decided to form an alliance of Left parties and field candidates,” he added.

The CPI, he said, was holding a meeting on Tuesday to finalise the seats.

CPI (M) leader Heera Lal Yadav said the Left parties had mainly interested in forming an alliance with the SP since it was the only party that looked in a position to take on the BJP, but the efforts did not succeed.

“The CPI (M) will hold its internal meeting very soon to decide on candidates,” he said.

Heera Lal Yadav indicated that the Left parties, including the All-India Forward Bloc and the Communist Party of Inidia (Marxist-Leninist), may together field candidates from around 35 constituencies where they have some influence.

While the CPI (M) may field candidates in districts like Varanasi, Chandauli, Sonbhadra and Mirzapur, the CPI is considering contesting seats in western UP districts too.

“Since our main objective is to stop the BJP from coming to power, we have decided to field candidates only on a limited number of seats so that the ant-BJP votes do not go to waste,” Yadav said.

The Left movement is said to have become weak in the post “mandal-kamandal’ era and the left parties have ceased to make an electoral mark in the politics of the state since then. They failed to send a single candidate to the Vidhan Sabha in 2007, 2012 and 2017 assembly elections though the Left parties have organisational presence in most of the districts.