On a day when Congress president Sonia Gandhi and party general secretary Rahul cancelled their proposed trips to Kolkata to campaign for Trinamool chief Mamata Banerjee, it was state Congress president and External Affairs Minister Pranab Mukherjee who stepped in at the eleventh hour for a late-evening joint rally in Behala — an area merged with Kolkata South constituency after delimitation.

Mukherjee, who arrived over two hours late for the joint rally, slammed the Left for being the party that gave “credibility” to the BJP.

“In 1988, when the Congress had reduced the BJP to two seats in the Lok Sabha, (CPM veteran) Jyoti Basu held the hands of Atal Behari Vajpayee at a rally near Shahid Mindar and declared that BJP is not a political untouchable, thus giving them political identity. In the very next election they (BJP) bounced back with 90 seats. Now, the Left is saying that BJP is communal,” Mukherjee said.

The senior Congressman said no government that got Left support, including those led by V P Singh, I K Gujral and H D Deve Gowda, lasted more than two years. “The Left wants unrest at the Centre so they can squeeze certain advantages out of the instability. It is clear what the nature of these Leftists is,” he said.

Mukherjee said the Congress-Trinamool seat-sharing alliance was born out of the need to abide by the general consensus of the common man. “This alliance is a people’s alliance and so long as the people are supporting it, this alliance will continue,” he said.

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