Bangladesh Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina “undermined her status and office” by calling up Mamata Banerjee, victor of the election in India's West Bengal state, a Dhaka daily said on Sunday.
New Age took exception to Hasina telephoning Mamata, “a chief minister-elect” of an Indian state. Hasina’s “apparent euphoria” at the defeat of the Left Front in West Bengal “tends to betray her attitude towards Left politics in general”. That “should be an eye-opener for the Left-leaning parties” which are in the Awami League-led ruling alliance, it said.
The newspaper editorial criticised the Indian media for its ‘simplistic’ conclusion that the communists were out of the power for good. It said the Communist Party of India-Marxist had long ceased to be a communist party in the real sense, having made “a fundamental compromise on the ideological plain, manifested by apparently endless adjustment and accommodation, ultimately rendered it into a left-of-centre liberal democratic bourgeoisie, not an exponent of communism that it used to be”.