CPM secretary-general Sitaram Yechury on Tuesday said that his party would contest seven Assembly and one Lok Sabha seat in Odisha where parliamentary and state legislature elections are being held simultaneously.

Yechury, who did not name the seats his party plans to contest, said that the CPM would go to the polls with its INDIA alliance partners in the state.

“We have decided to contest a limited number of seats because our allies like the Congress would be fighting on other seats,” said the veteran who described Naveen Patnaik-led Biju Janata Dal (BJD) and BJP, the main Opposition party in the state, as two sides of the same coin.

“They were keen on having an alliance this time but it did not work out,” he added while addressing a press conference here.

Describing the BJP as the fountainhead of all corruption, Yechury said that the party that was heading the NDA government at the Centre was using agencies like the Enforcement Directorate (ED) to browbeat the Opposition. The communist veteran, however, asserted that the INDIA alliance would do everything possible to unseat Prime Minister Narendra Modi who was stifling democracy by using coercive tactics against the Opposition.

Yechury, accusing the Modi regime of indulging in corruption of all kinds, said the government was using intimidatory tactics to silence any kind of opposition to its misrule.

However, he admitted that while INDIA alliance partners were fully united in their endeavour to defeat the BJP-led NDA political situation in certain seats like Bengal could see them fighting against each other.