TMC sees urban discontent over Nandigram

If the opposition alliance is at its weakest anywhere, it is East Midnapore. An added cushion for the Trinamool is the absence of the BJP, whose presence in quite a few zones can add just that degree of unpredictability to a contest that analysts love and established politicians hate.
But, if Nandigram's and East Midnapore's rural politics gives Mamata Banerjee and her party a degree of comfort, the urban rub-off has been nightmarish for the Trinamool." Amar naam, tomar naam, Nandigram", which gave the urban, Left-leaning intelligentsia a moral counterweight to Left politics' " amar naam, tomar naam, Vietnam" for a few fleeting years, has now given way to an urban disenchantment with the Trinamool. Few of those, who trudged to Nandigram to see for themselves the level of violence wreaked on villagers by the CPM cadre, can be seen under the Trinamool flag now.
The nine seats in Cooch Behar in the state's northern extreme add their element of intrigue to the last round of elections; the import of these nine seats goes beyond their numerical significance and would, hopefully for the ruling party, give it a pan-Bengal presence if the other North Bengal districts choose to look the other way. The Trinamool holds a majority of the seats here - and has succeeded in weaning away an opposition MLA whose dad, the Forward Bloc's Kamal Guha, used to be the Left Front's bulwark in Cooch Behar - but the chief minister' camping in North Bengal during polling there could point to a growing unease with the situation in the rest of the state.
Mamata Banerjee has been her party's star campaigner and she may want a few days of respite from the heat and dust of Kolkata but her political opponents would like to see in her move a tacit acknowledgement of what they have been saying: that things have changed since Bengal started voting on April 4 and that the fight has become much closer and more difficult to predict than it was barely a month ago.