In its manifesto for the coming panchayat elections, the party focussed on a rural utopia, omitting mention of Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee’s industrialisation drive.

The Front’s 11-point programme begins with a promise of greater financial and administrative powers for the three-tier panchayat system, in which over 50,000 seats will be up for grabs. It continues with promises for better irrigation, rural roads, electrification and small and medium enterprises.

Bengal is the only state to transform rural masses by implementing land reforms and the panchayati raj system, said Biman Bose, CPM state secretary and Front chairman.

“Still, the Left Front’s focus on small and medium industry will remain sharp as ever,” he said.

For this sector, the Front has promised modernisation and diversification. This will be complimented by a thrust in the service sector, with steps promised to bring rural and urban Bengal closer.

The general price rise has become another nightmare for the CPM. As a party source pointed out, inflation has affected all voters, rich or poor. Bose said the campaign will try to pin the blame on the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government at the Centre.”We shall explain to the people that we have no role,” said Bose.

But a senior CPM leader pointed out that it would be very difficult to sell this line to the masses, considering that it is the party’s support that has kept the UPA government alive.

Party sources said the CPM has felt the strong backlash of the Nandigram fiasco during the current spell of elections to managing committees of government-aided schools across the state.

For the first time in the Front’s 30-year rule, CPM-controlled committees are being ousted by opposition parties like Trinamool Congress and the Peoples’ Democratic Conference of India (PDCI), a wing of Siddiqullah Chowdhury’s Jamiat e ulema e Hind.

Although the CPM has managed to quell an imminent revolt by Front partners like the Forward Bloc — which at one time had promised to contest the elections on its own — the party is jittery about its prospects among the 3.7 crore voters in the panchayat system.