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Ganashakti, the Bengali daily which is the mouthpiece of the CPM’s West Bengal unit, quoted Karat as saying: “An opportunistic alliance like the UNPA cannot last long.”
Karat’s comments are not likely to be taken kindly by various leaders of the UNPA like the Samajwadi Party's Mulayam Singh Yadav and the Telugu Desam’s Chandrababu Naidu, who have been courted by Karat for the past few months.
Sources said Karat had deliberately gotten close to the SP, TDP and other regional parties to annoy the Congress. At Coimbatore on Monday, Karat also made it clear the party should work for a Third Front keeping in mind that the general elections will be held after one year. “Most of the regional parties function with an opportunistic view, and this is especially evident during elections. But they try to gain acceptability with the people by siding with us,” Karat said.
CPM sources said the party has been supporting the
Congress-led UPA for the past four years, so it would have become tricky for it to work for a Third Front that is against the Congress.
At the same time, they said, it would be impossible for the CPM to make any electoral alliance with the Congress.
Before Karat’s address, 41 of the 700-odd delegates put for their views on the call for a third alternative in the draft political resolution, and all of them had raised a common question — how and why? Karat, replying to these doubts in his address, said: “It is a fact that we have been supporting the UPA government from the outside for the last four years. We cannot sit quiet now without indicating our alliances.” A source said Karat’s dilemma is that he considers some regional parties to be better than the Congress.
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