On the face of it, the 11 seats in Kolkata and its suburbs that go to polls on Wednesday — 10 are with the Left now — are all about CPM versus Mamata Banerjee’s Trinamool Congress. But the writing on the walls of this city points to a bigger script: who will be with the Congress after May 16 — and how this will draw the battlelines for the final war, the Assembly elections.

That war is far away, in 2011, but it has come to define the discourse on either side in the last days of the campaign — a clear indication of growing disquiet within the CPM.

For the first time, Mamata, who has always packaged herself as the state’s solitary anti-establishment queen, is now presenting herself as a member of an extended Congress Parivar. Virtually each poster of hers — or those of her party candidates — across the city features smiling faces of Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh, Rahul Gandhi, Pranab Mukherjee and Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi.

The CPM has struck back — even using Pink Floyd.

In its posters attacking her, it has lifted the art from the 1994 cover of Pink Floyd’s last studio album, The Division Bell. It features two mysterious stone-sculpted heads and the text spells it out: don’t trust her, she can go with the Congress or the BJP.

A CPM party member said the poster was designed by a team of SFI students from Presidency College and Jadavpur University. “We are aware that many people in the city do not know who or what Pink Floyd is but the design was very appropriate for the message we wanted to convey,” state Tourism Minister Manab Mukherjee, who is in charge of advertisement and publicity, told The Indian Express. “Our message is that Mamata has two faces, which one are you going to believe?”

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