Veteran Communist Party of India (Marxist) leader Ashok Bhattacharya recently said that in a bid to counter the ruling Trinamool Congress in West Bengal, a section of Left voters was indirectly helping the BJP, but this trend should stop in the Assembly elections this month. Following the statement by Bhattacharya, a former CPI(M) MLA from north Bengal, Trinamool Congress’ national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee said it was a “delayed” realisation for the Left leader.
Left’s vote share
Addressing an election rally in Kolkata, Banerjee said he was glad to hear such an admission from a senior CPI(M) leader, and added that the Trinamool Congress had long been maintaining that Left voters were shifting towards the BJP. Notably, even at a time when the Left front lost miserably in the Assembly elections in 2011, its vote share was high at 39.68 per cent, while it was just 4.06 per cent for the saffron party. Since then, the Left front has seen a drastic depletion of vote share, while the BJP has witnessed a massive increase.
“If you look at the 2016 Assembly election results for West Bengal, the Left front had recorded around 26 per cent vote share, which was 29 per cent in 2014 Lok Sabha, while for BJP it was 17 per cent in 2014. The Left came down drastically to around 6-7 per cent in the 2019 Lok Sabha and 2021 Assembly polls. In the same period, the BJP increased its vote share from around 10 per cent in 2016 to 40 per cent in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections. That means a large chunk of voters have shifted from the Left to the BJP,” Maidul Islam, Professor, Political Science, Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, told businessline.
“After 2019, Left vote share is hovering between 5-7 per cent, while that of the BJP remains between 38-40 per cent in the State. Since 2019, we have seen a few Left leaders joining the saffron party in their attempt to fight the ruling Trinamool Congress. These leaders thought that the Left is currently not in a position to challenge Trinamool’s might,” Islam observed.
In a politically significant development just before the elections, Soumya Basu, son of former CPI(M) leader Anil Basu, was seen at a BJP meeting in Chinsurah in Hooghly district, publicly aligning himself with the saffron party and criticising the present state of Left politics in Bengal. The meeting was attended by State BJP President Samik Bhattacharya.
Islam pointed out that West Bengal has always witnessed periods of long bipolarity and short transition periods of multipolarity. “From 2019, we are witnessing a bipolar political system in Bengal, where the ruling Trinamool and Opposition BJP are the two main parties, and strength of the Left and the Congress has evaporated. Before 2019, we saw the Trinamool and the Left as the two major parties. Several decades ago, Congress and the Left had been ruling the roost in the State,” he added.
‘Will comeback’
Senior CPI(M) leaders, however, remain hopeful that there is a chance for the Left’s resurgence in the upcoming elections. “The ground reality suggests that there is a chance for resurgence. Leftists will resurge. People do not believe that the BJP is an alternative to Trinamool,” said Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya, outgoing Rajya Sabha MP of CPI(M). The Left parties had failed to register victory in a single seat in the 2021 Assembly elections in 2021.
“A massive terror took place in our State after the Trinamool Congress came to power in 2011. As a result, a section of voters felt that they might get shelter from the BJP as the party is in power at the Centre. That perception was created. But now this illusion has vanished,” added Bhattacharya, who is contesting from the Jadavpur constituency in the southern outskirts of Kolkata.
In West Bengal, voting will be conducted in two phases on April 23 and April 29. The first phase in the State will cover 152 Assembly constituencies, and 142 constituencies in the second phase.
Published on April 10, 2026