Left parties lose badly in erstwhile strongholds Bengal, Kerala, Tripura

The main Left Front parties --- Communist Party of India (CPI) and Communist Party of India (Maxist) --- will have just one member of Lok Sabha from its erstwhile stronghold states of Kerala, West Bengal and Tripura. The CPI(M) won Alathur parliamentary constituency in Kerala.

Outside these three states, the Left parties won five seats --- four as part of INDIA bloc in Tamil Nadu and Sikar in Rajasthan.

In Kerala, where the Left Democratic Front (LDF) is the ruling alliance in the state, CPI(M) candidate K Radhakrishnan managed to win by a margin of 20,000 votes and many of its high-profile candidates such as former state finance minister Thomas Isaac and former state health minister K K Shailaja lost. However, the Left parties received about 32% vote share, almost double of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)’s 16.7% vote share as compared to 35% for the Congress.

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The CPI(M) and its partners in West Bengal, where party ruled for almost 34 years before the Trinamool Congress (TMC) defeated them in 2011, were virtually decimated in the Lok Sabha polls securing only around 5% votes across the eastern state. In the 2019 polls, in which the state LF could not win any seat, its vote share was 6.33 %.

The CPI(M) fielded many student and youth leaders in a bid to reach out to first generation voters, but the strategy failed with the party landing in third position in several of the 42 Lok Sabha seats. The Left Front contested 30 of Bengal’s 42 seats this year in alliance with the Congress, which contested 12 segments. The Congress could retain only one of the two seats it had won five years ago. In Murshidabad district, which has Bengal’s highest Muslim population of 62.28 %, CPI(M) state secretary Md Salim was defeated by TMC’s sitting MP Abu Taher.

In Tripura, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) emerged victorious in two Lok Sabha seats defeating the Left and Congress alliance. This is the second victory of the saffron party in the Lok Sabha polls after 2019 in the state. Former chief minister and BJP candidate Biplab Kumar Deb defeated Congress candidate Ashish Kumar Saha in West Tripura constituency and in East Tripura constituency, BJP candidate Kriti Devi Debbarman defeated CPIM candidate Rajendra Reang.