The two-day meeting will be held on May 25 which will be attended by all the district committee secretaries who were in charge of managing the elections in their concerned districts.

Alimuddin Street has blamed the malfunctioning of the three-tier panchayati raj system for the loss. Biman Bose and Benoy Konar have stressed that the failure of the panchayats had led to the defeat. But district-level leaders are not ready to accept the logic. The hastily drawn conclusion of the bosses has not gone down well and a section is openly pointing fingers at the state government’s land acquisition policy.

Amitava Bose, district secretary of North-24 Parganas told The Indian Express: “There could be other factors, but in my district, acquiring land for the Salim’s highway project had played a vital role in deciding the outcome.”

In the district, a so-called red fort, the CPM was trounced by the TMC. Although the party managed to scrape through in the Zila Parishad by a narrow margin, its result in the grassroot level was devastating. The same holds true for South-24 Parganas — at all levels.

The decision for the meeting was taken after party patriarch Jyoti Basu rejected any “oversimplification” of the issue.