Cong’s West Bengal Lok Sabha list of 11 out

New Delhi: Putting to bed speculation over an alliance with t-he CPI(M) in West Ben-gal, the Congress on Monday cleared the names of 11 candidates from the st-ate which includes candidates from Raiganj and Murshidabad — the two contentious seats that the Left Party has refused to part with.

After the third meeting in so many days, the Pradesh Election Committee of Bengal had on Sunday decided against any allia-nce with the CPI(M) in Bengal following which Bengal Congress leaders flew to the capital and this morning submitted a list of 11 candidates to the party’s central leadership.

The list includes the na-mes of Deepa Dasmunshi from Raiganj, Abu Hena from Murshidabad and Abhijit Mukherjee from Jangipur among others.

Sources said at its meeting in the evening, the party’s screening committee is understood to have cleared the names of the 11 candidates.

The CPI(M)-led Left Front has already announced the names of 25 candidates from the state, leaving 17 for the Congress.

The CPI(M) had earlier this month announced a no-mutual contest with the Congress in six seats out of which the seats of Raiganj and Murshida-bad from where it has sitting MLAs it had kept for itself. The party had also made it clear that no alliance was possible unless these two sitting seats were left for it.

However, the state Cong-ress leadership had objec-ted to this, saying the party had strong chances of winning these seats in the Lok Sabha polls. While Murshidabad was supposed to be the bastion of Behrampore MP Adhir Chowdhary, senior leader Deepa Dasmunshi had lost the Raiganj seat by a mere 1,600 votes.

The Bengal leaders feel that ground realities have changed since the 2014 general polls and this time it was a fight between brand Modi and brand Rahul and hence all anti-BJP votes would come towards the Congress.

Though many Bengal leaders have been claiming that the party would field candidates in all 42 seats in the state, a senior leader told this newspaper that it would find it difficult to get contestants from more than 20 seats.