Leader of the Opposition Suvendu Adhikari on Saturday urged voters of the Congress and the CPM to vote for the BJP in the July 8 rural polls by dubbing the first two parties the “B-teams” of Trinamul in Bengal.

Adhikari, who made this remark at a rural poll campaign rally in East Midnapore’s Heria, referred to the recent meeting of the national Opposition to justify his remarks.

Fifteen Opposition parties met in Patna where top leaders of Trinamul, the CPM and the Congress broke bread as part of a bid to put up a united fight against the Narendra Modi government in the 2024 Lok Sabha polls.

“Sitaram Yechury (the CPM general secretary) had fish fry and biryani with (Trinamul chairperson) Mamata Banerjee in Patna. To vote for you (the CPM and the Congress) is to vote for Trinamul. The CPM and the Congress are the B-Teams of Trinamul in Bengal,” Adhikari said

“In Delhi, the CPM and the Trinamul are the B-teams of the Congress. Whereas in Kerala, the CPM and the Congress are pitted against each other. Only the BJP does not have any setting,” he added.

This consolidation of anti-Trinamul votes, especially the swing of the Left votes to the BJP, played a key role in the last Lok Sabha polls, when the BJP won 18 out of 42 seats in Bengal.

Adhikari’s plea, multiple BJP sources said, was primarily because of the saffron camp’s internal assessment that the BJP’s base was dwindling with the apparent resurgence of the Congress and the Left in parts of Bengal.

“His statement acknowledges the BJP’s massive dependence on votes from the Left and Congress supporters. These votes helped our party secure 77 seats in the 2021 Assembly polls and send 18 MPs to Parliament from Bengal in 2019,” a BJP state office-bearer said.

The saffron camp received 38.1 per cent votes in the 2021 Assembly polls as compared to 10.16 per cent in 2016. During the same period, CPM’s vote share dropped from 19.75 per cent to 4.72 per cent and that of Congress from 12.25 per cent to 2.94 per cent. Both the CPM and the Congress leadership had accepted that the rise in BJP’s vote share had to an extent come at the cost of the erosion of their own.

In recent times, the Congress and the CPM seemed to have corrected their course to an extent. In several closed-door meetings, BJP leaders claimed “the real opposition to Trinamul in the grassroots is being done by the CPM”.

In the civic polls soon after the Assembly polls, four Left parties secured nearly 14 per cent votes in comparison to the BJP’s 12 per cent and the Congress’s 5 per cent.

In Bengal’s bypolls between 2021 and 2023, as the CPM’s vote share gradually rose, the BJP came third. The Ballygunge bypoll of 2022 showed the BJP lost 7.85 per cent votes in just a year, its vote share slipping from 20.68 per cent to 12.83 per cent. The CPM rose from 5.61 per cent to 30.06 per cent.

The biggest recovery made by the CPM-Congress alliance was witnessed in Sagardighi bypoll earlier this year in which Bayron Biswas, a Congress candidate supported by the Left parties, drew 87,667 votes defeating the Trinamul candidate. While the alliance hiked its vote share from 19.45 per cent to 47.35 per cent, the BJP receded to the third spot as its share went down to 13.94 per cent from 24.08 per cent.

“ Resistance against Trinamul goons during panchayat poll nominations was primarily put up by the Left and Congress. While we shifted our candidates to safe houses to avoid assault, their candidates fought it out on the field,” a BJP source said. “There are ample reasons why Suvenduda desperately appealed for votes of CPM and Congress supporters,” the BJP leader added.

CPM’s central committee member Samik Lahiri said people knew it was the BJP that had a secret pact with Trinamul.

“Everyone knows how panchayat polls were looted in 2018 under the leadership of Suvendu Adhikari. No one will fall for his false narrative,” he said.

State Congress chief Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury said Adhikari was losing his foothold and hence making such statements.

Trinamul said earlier the BJP had a secret pact with the CPM but Adhikari’s appeal made it public. Trinamul’snational spokesperson Sukhendu Sekhar Roy said people would figure out the “nexus”.

Locally, at some panchayat seats, the BJP, the Congress and the CPM supported the same candidate to take on Trinamul. Though no party centrally approved these “local alliances”, they admitted grassroots equations weren’t always in their control.

“We have no alliance with the CPM or the Congress. Our ideology is completely different.... But at the local level, some equations are hard to control,” said state BJP chief Sukanta Majumdar at Calcutta Press Club on Saturday.