3 min readNew DelhiMar 3, 2023 09:33 AM IST
First published on: Mar 2, 2023 at 03:51 PM IST
The Tipraha Indigenous Progressive Regional Alliance (TIPRA Motha), which emerged as a force to reckon with in the run-up to the Assembly elections in Tripura, won 13 seats, chipping away at the ruling coalition of BJP-Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura (IPFT), which would have preferred a more comfortable majority.
The electoral yield of the party, led by royal scion Pradyot Debbarma, may appear underwhelming, especially after it galvanised the indigenous communities with its core demand for a separate state of “Greater Tipraland”. But it has left the CPI(M) behind with two seats behind and emerged as the second largest party after the BJP.
While the TIPRA contested 42 seats, even fielding Bengali candidates in unreserved seats in a bid to tackle the possibility of ethnic polarisation and the consolidation of Bengali votes in the BJP’s favour, it was really in contention only in the 20 seats reserved for Scheduled Tribes (STs).
Out of the 20 ST seats, the party captured 10, mostly with huge margins. In the Takarjala seat, for example, it bagged around 86 per cent of the vote share that had gone to the BJP ally IPFT in 2018. Takarjala, in some ways, captures the big shift in tribal votes from the IPFT, which is likely to settle with one seat down from the eight it won in 2018, to the TIPRA Motha.
But the absence of a seat-sharing arrangement with the Left-Congress combine also appeared to have hurt the TIPRA. In as many as seven ST seats — Krishnapur, Bagma, Santirbazar, Manu and Ambassa — the BJP surged ahead of TIPRA, while the CPI(M) managed to hold on to a significant portion of votes.
One TIPRA Motha leader offered a counter. “Had we allied with the CPM-Congress, people may have rejected us. Our unique selling point was the fact that we did not compromise,” he said.
In a narrow contest in Charilam, Deputy Chief Minister Jishnu Dev Varma, the sitting MLA, got 12,799 votes, while TIPRA candidate Subodh Deb Barma got 13,657 votes.
The Congress also bagged a substantial 9,335 votes, showing the impact of a split in Opposition votes. At the Krishnapur ST constituency, the BJP got 13,466 votes, while the TIPRA and CPI(M) got 10,849 and 8,397 votes, respectively.
For now, TIPRA’s hopes to play the kingmaker in the event of a hung Assembly stands dashed, but the BJP, which would have preferred a more comfortable majority, has already started making overtures towards Debbarma, who had held multiple rounds of talks with the BJP leadership ahead of the polls.
Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) supporters celebrate the party's lead during the counting of votes of the Tripura Assembly elections, at Dharmanagar in North Tripura district, Thursday, March 2, 2023. (PTI Photo) 
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