Third Front certain to win Lok Sabha polls, asserts Karat

Communist Party of India-Marxist general secretary Prakash Karat on Sunday said it was now "thousand per cent confirmed" that the Third Front with the Left parties in the lead would form the government at the centre after the Lok Sabha polls.

Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) general secretary Prakash Karat on Sunday said it was now "thousand per cent confirmed" that the Third Front with the Left parties in the lead would form the government at the centre after the Lok Sabha polls.

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"While the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) has already broken, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has not a single ally in Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa and many other states," he said, addressing an election rally in the Tripura capital.

Karat said the people are "fed up" with both the Congress-led UPA and the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) governments as their economic policies are same, and want a "third alternative government".

In his 30-minute speech, the CPI-M chief cited the "wrong and anti-people policies" of both the Congress and the BJP and stressed the importance of forming an alternative government at the centre.

"The agrarian crisis, price rise, unemployment, and the falling living standards of the people are all being ignored by the Congress rulers. This is going to cost them heavily."

Karat said as the left parties intervened in the central government's policies till July last year, the effect of world-wide economic slowdown was yet to impacted on the Indian economy."

Talking to the newsmen later, the CPI-M leader, however, refused to predict how many seats the Left parties and other alliance parties of Third Front expected to win.

"The Left parties alone are fighting more than 150 seats and if the parties aligned with the Third Front are taken into account, the combine is fighting far more seats than the Congress party," he said.