Far from Parliament, CPM backs man who brags he saw Babri fall

And you can also check this out with Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi, Congress chief whip in Lok Sabha. An agency today reported that Dasmunsi and veteran Congress MP Abdul Ghani Khan Chowdhury voted for a BJP candidate in the standing committee of the Malda zilla parishad.

Justifying the move, state Congress general secretary Manas Bhuniya said his party had voted for the BJP member due to ‘‘political compulsion.’’ He said Dasmunsi and Ghani Khan Chowdhury had taken the decision to ‘‘respect the verdict of the people’’ who wanted the CPI(M)-led Left Front out of power.

Listen to what Biswajit Sinha, a lieutenant of Union Minister Tapan Sikdar, has to say about his past and the tie-up with a section of the CPI(M) for the Baidyapur gram panchayat in Malda.

‘‘I was arrested near Faizabad a few days before the Babri Masjid demolition but I was at the site when it happened… We saw a split in the CPI(M) and capitilised on it. The way the CPI(M) is disintegrating, it will disappear from Habibpur block,’’ the CPI(M) had won an absolute majority by capturing 13 out of 22 seats.

But the 13 winning members fell out over the candidature of the pradhan. Behind-the-scene moves resulted in a stunning CPI(M)-BJP tie-up: the board has CPI(M)’s Anil Roy as pradhan while his deputy is BJP’s Santosh Soren.

Speaking to The Indian Express, Roy said: ‘‘Yes, eight elected CPI(M) members and I voted for BJP’s Soren to make him the upa-pradhan. It is also true that I have become the pradhan with the BJP and Trinamool Congress votes. But what’s the alternative? The party high command did not listen to the local demand that I be made the pradhan.’’

There’s another example from Bipradaspur gram panchayat in Gosaba block of South 24 Parganas.

The CPI(M) leaders roped in the Trinamool Congress to oust its coalition partner, the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP), which had won the largest number of six seats.

With four more of the CPI(M), the RSP should have had a comfortable majority to get the seat of gram panchayat pradhan in Bipradaspur. But the local CPI(M) had other ideas. It teamed up with the TMC and the BJP to defeat the RSP. The CPI(M) members voted for the TMC to give it the upa-pradhan’s post, exchanging it with TMC and BJP votes for its pradhan.

There are more such alliances in Mandirbazar, Masjidbari and Kulpi panchayats of South 24-Parganas, in Swarupnagar-Banglani and Saraphul Nirman panchayats in North 24-Parganas as well as areas in East Midnapore, Birbhum and other districts.

The CPI(M) high command admits it has detected at least 13 such gram panchayats where party supprters have gone in for ‘‘unprincipled alliances’’ with other political parties in brazen violation of the party whip.

Highly embarrassed, the party has undertaken a damage control exercise by suspending over 30 party members. Warnings have been issued in a number of other gram panchayats and a deadline set for corrective steps.