NEW DELHI: If CPM’s Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharya , the Left candidate who has Congress support for Rajya Sabha polls from West Bengal, wins his seat, it could boost the two opposition forces in the state to consolidate the tie-up ahead of next year’s assembly polls.The Left and Congress had joined ranks to take on the Mamata Banerjee-led Trinamool Congress in the 2016 assembly polls, but the experiment had miserably failed. The Left, in fact, saw its worst ever performance.The efforts by the two camps to stitch up an alliance had started in 2014-15 to counter the overwhelming presence of Trinamool Congress and a steady rise of BJP which had little presence in the state till 2011. That was the year when TMC ended a 34-year uninterrupted run of the Left Front in the state.A win for Bhattacharya, a former Kolkata mayor who looks comfortable in terms of numbers to enter the upper House, could be a “morale booster for both our supporters and party workers”, said a senior Congress functionary from the state. This could be the trigger for an alliance between Congress and Left Front for the next assembly elections.West Bengal has five seats at stake for Rajya Sabha polls in this round with TMC having the numbers to take four. The contest will be for the fifth seat. Congress had offered its support to CPM, though keeping in mind Sitaram Yechury who finally failed to get his party’s nod. Bhattacharya faces independent Dinesh Bajaj, who could get the extra votes from TMC and BJP.However, if votes of TMC and BJP votes go for Bajaj, it could be cited by rivals Congress and Left as a “covert understanding” between Mamata and the saffron party even though the Bengal CM is seen as a bitter critic of the Modi government at the Centre and that of BJP in the state.BJP’s unprecedented success in the 2019 Lok Sabha elections in which the party won 18 seats in the state was seen as a warning signal by the Left and Congress and could propel them to join hands again. In the past 10 months, the two sides have held joint street protests against the CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) and NRC (National Register of Citizens), withdrawal of Kashmir's special status and communal violence in Delhi. They have been putting out joint resolutions in the state assembly and even addressing the media together.