“He is a scholar, a secular person, and has a family background in the Freedom Struggle,” said Priya Ranjan Dasmunsi, Pradesh Congress President, after announcing his party’s support for the independent. “I appeal to all political parties to support Malihabadi so that he can go to Rajya Sabha,” Dasmunsi said.

The CPM promptly said it will support the 78-year-old Urdu scholar. The Congress-CPM tie-up will ensure the defeat of Trinamool Congress candidate Dinesh Trivedi, who had filed his nomination on Thursday.

Of the five Rajya Sabha seats from West Bengal, for which elections will be held on March 26, the CPM has put up candidates for three and the Forward Bloc one. No group will have enough votes to elect the fifth on its own.

Each candidate needs the votes of at least 49 members of the legislative assembly.

The Left Front, after electing its four candidates, will have spent 196 votes, leaving it with 39 legislators.

The Trinamool Congress has just 29 MLAs and the Congress 22 MLAs, so neither party has the minimum required to elect a Rajya Sabha member.

Sources in the CPM said the party had been discussing the name of various Independent candidates with the Congress for the past few days, and the agreement on Malihabadi came today. The Congress had proposed the name.

On earlier occasions too, the CPM’s support had helped the Congress get some Independents elected —— retired army chief Shankar Roy Chowdhury in 1999 and economist Arjun Sengupta in 2005.

Trinamool Congress chief Mamata Banerjee was not upset with the Congress-CPM tie-up as she is betting that the links between the two parties will help her cause in the panchayat elections in May and the general elections later. “We have been saying all along that the CPM and Congress are brothers,” Mamata told reporters.

But the Congress has already begun preparing its defence. Some Congress leaders pointed out that if Mamata had wanted to form an alliance with their party to take on the CPM, she should not have rejected its choice of Saifuddin Chowdhury as the fifth Rajya Sabha candidate and backed Dinesh Trivedi.