The beleaguered Left Front has fallen back on 72-year-old warhorse Asok Bhattacharya in its bid to retain the Siliguri Municipal Corporation (SMC), one of the few urban bodies that the Left has managed to win since 2011, when Trinamul rose to power in Bengal.

The Left released a list of 35 candidates for the SMC polls on Tuesday. Bhattacharya was nominated as the candidate from ward 6, which he won in the 2015 civic polls. It was apparent that the veteran leader would be the face of the party in the polls.

“Asok Bhattacharya, former mayor of Siliguri, will contest the upcoming SMC poll from ward 6. Apart from that we have announced our candidates in 34 seats in the first phase. We will announce names of the rest of the candidates by December 30,” said Jibesh Sarkar, a state committee member of CPM.

Bhattacharya, five-time MLA, former chairman of Siliguri municipality and former mayor of Siliguri corporation, had announced his retirement from electoral politics following his defeat from Siliguri in the 2021 Bengal Assembly elections.

The sitting MLA came third after Trinamul’s Om Prakash Mishra and winning BJP candidate Shankar Ghosh. Ghosh, who defected from the CPM before the Assembly polls, is widely considered to be Bhatttacharya’s protégé.

Asked about the civic polls, Bhattacharya said: “I had earlier announced my decision not to participate in any electoral politics after the Assembly polls but in the Communist party, the party’s decision is always above individual choices and decisions.”

Sources said the party’s state committee wanted Bhattacharya. There are rumours that former chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee prodded him to lead the party in the polls.

However, if the recent Assembly elections are any indicator, Bhattacharya has a hard battle at hand.

BJP’s Ghosh polled 89,370 votes, some 50 per cent of the votes polled in the Assembly segment. Trinamul’s Mishra, despite being an “outsider” to Siliguri, had polled 53,784 or a vote share of 30 percent.

Bhattacharya on the other hand only received 28,835 votes with a 16 percent vote share.

The veteran CPM leader has had a chequered career and was largely credited for coming up with the “Siliguri model” in which the Left and the Congress collectively took on Trinamul and the BJP.

Although the Left leaders did not speak much about the model on Tuesday, the Left has not announced candidates in four wards that the Congress won in the previous SMC polls.

The decision to field Bhattacharya, many observers believe, is also an indication that the Left has failed to build up a strong second line of leadership in Siliguri.

CPM leaders, however, said that they had inducted new faces. “Out of the 35 candidates, we have fielded 27 new faces,” said Sarkar.