Tripura: BJP’s civic polls sweep gives Biplab a shot in arm; TMC rising

The BJP, that had got 43.59% in the 2018 polls, garnered as many as 59.01% of the votes – winning 99% of the 222 seats that went to polls, sweeping 11 of the 14 urban bodies. Earlier, it won 1,123 seats across seven urban bodies uncontested. Prime Minister Narendra Modi said the results showed people had voted for “good governance”. CM Deb said his government was not planning “for merely five years but 25”.

BJP spokesperson Nabendu Bhattacharya said the BJP had the “strength” now to fight in all the seats of Tripura in 2023 and win. (In 2018, the BJP fought in alliance with the tribal Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura, but tension has been growing between the two parties). As the TMC catches up with the CPM, Bhattacharya also insisted that their main Opposition was the CPM.

The BJP also dismisses the Opposition’s charge that the civic polls were massively rigged, with violence preventing its supporters from casting their vote. CPM leader and former CM Manik Sarkar has called the polls a “farce”.

CPM secretary Jitendra Chaudhury said any projections for the 2023 Assembly elections based on the civic polls would be “misplaced”. “People were not allowed to vote freely in the civic polls.”

The Left appears to have managed to keep its votes intact in North Tripura, Dhalai, South Tripura and large parts of Sepahijala district. According to Chaudhury, Tripura kept quiet through the civic poll rigging “since it was not an election to change government”, but would throw out the BJP government in 2023.

The TMC attributed its performance – despite it not having a full-fledged organisation at the sub-division or block levels – to their work in the past three months. Tripura TMC convener Subal Bhowmik said people were looking for an “alternative to the BJP”, and they provided it.

While agreeing with the CPM that the results might not be reflection of public opinion, political observer Sekhar Dutta said that while its committed cadre stand by it, the party is still struggling to reinvent itself after its defeat in 2018. Even the TMC, Dutta said, would struggle in 2024 unless it built an organisation from the ground.

While holding that the civic poll results did not reflect the “true public mandate”, Bhowmik conceded the TMC’s organisational deficiencies in the state. He said his party has started building the organisation right from the booth level, claiming that it would be completed over the next few months. Asked whether the party’s 16.39 per cent vote share in the civic polls came from the vote base of the BJP or the Left, he said the voters of both the ruling party and the Opposition camp were shifting to the TMC.

What did help the BJP in the civic polls was the splitting of votes between the CPM and the TMC. In 12 of the AMC’s 51 wards, the cumulative votes of the CPM-led Left Front and the Trinamool are higher than the BJP, which won with a narrow margin above the cumulative TMC-Left votes in several wards.

This was also reflected by the outcome in some other Municipal Councils and Nagar Panchayats. In the Sonamura Nagar Panchayat, the BJP emerged victorious by securing 3632 votes – 244 more than the cumulative votes of the Left the TMC. The BJP garnered 4240 votes in the Ambassa Municipal Council where the cumulative votes of the TMC and the CPM stands at 4730.