The Left Front's debacle in the 15 Lok Sabha poll was not a surprise as everybody was expecting it, said a senior cadre of the Marxist party in Mumbai when he saw the election results trickling in from the news channels.

A staunch supporter of the Marxists since his school days, he said the policies of the Left were seen by many as arrogant and anti-reformist.
 
With just 4 out of 20 seats in Kerala, and the Congress- Trinamool combine poised to win more than half of the 42 seats, the Left has lost its last bastions. Even the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) reopened its account in the state with heavyweight Jaswant Singh winning the Darjeeling seat. The BJP had won two seats in the state in 1999, but then it was in alliance with the Trinamool.

In the 2004 elections, the Left Front had finished with a whopping 35 seats in West Bangal, while the Congress and the Trinamool had to be satisfied with 6 and 1, respectively.

The story was the same in Kerals too, where it had won 19 seats in the 14th Parliament.

''People were fed up with CPM's opportunism.. They had not changed their thinking with the passage of time,'' a  Left sympethiser said.

In their attack against the Congress-led UPA government, the Left parties had raised its ante against the Indo-US nuclear deal.

They opposed and even claimed to have thwarted several moves of the Manmohan Singh government on the economic front, like the pension scheme.   

The party's true colour come to light when it joined hands with Mayawati's Bahujan Samaj Party, JD (S) led by H D Deve Gowda, N Chandrababu Naidu-led Telugu Desam Party and J Jayalalithaa's AIADMK. This further alienated the Left from the masses, analysts say   

More importantly, the result is expected to bring to fore the longstanding feuds inside the party, analysts opined.

In Kerala, it is no secret that the chief minister-led Achutanandan faction and the group led by party state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan are at loggerheads since the last assembly elections.

At one stage, in a bid to check sectarianism, the central leadership suspended both Vijayan and VS Achuthanandan from the Politburo, the decision making body of CPM,.

The Pinarayi faction was supported in the Politburo by CPI-M general secretary Prakash Karat.

In West Bangal too, CPM's image was stained when chief minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee's police  fired on innocent villagers resisting forceful acquisition of their land, first in Singur and then in Nandigram.

When the intellectuals and general population rose in protest, their voices were silenced.. Even the central committee didn't bother to utter a word against the ruling party's misconduct.

"People are just fed up with the CPI-M Politburo's anti-people stance of formulating policies in air-conditioned rooms. A party can't be run on the basis of policies alone. Politics is to be understood through the public pulse," controversial West Bengal sports, transport and youth affairs minister Subhas Chakraborty had told a news channel in an interview.

The air is thick with suggestions of a split in CPM: the Pro-Karat and anti-Karat. Even cadres are not satisfied with the way the party functions.

It goes without saying that the anti-Karat section of the CPI-M in Bengal shares close ties with party patriarch Jyoti Basu. The Basu faction has not forgiven Karat for leading the opposition to the Marxist veteran becoming prime minister after the polls in 1996.

The big question now is whether CPM will be able to hold its cadres intact after their pathetic show in the polls, analysts said

Will the Karat faction can hold on its clout in the Politburo, or the Basu loyalists, including veteran parliamentarian like Somnath Chatterjee, be able to come up with a coup in the party.