Fri. Mar 29th, 2024

New Delhi: It is not uncommon to see Panchali Bhattacherjee returning on a cycle rickshaw from the neighborhood market near her official bungalow.

To put it into context, Panchali is the wife of Manik Sarkar, who has been Tripura’s Chief Minister for the last 20 years. The ‘poorest CM of India’ survives on the fee that he gets from his party, the CPI(M). He donates his CM’s salary to the party.But Manik Sarkar is probably fighting one of the toughest electoral battles of his lifetime. The BJP has been on a winning spree in the North East, but CPM’s Sitaram Yechury feels Sarkar is the general who will give the BJP its ‘Waterloo’ moment.

The battle in Tripura has always been between the Congress and the Communists. But this time, the BJP has made a direct entry at No. 2 by virtue of acquisition.

In the 2013 Assembly elections, the CPM won 49 seats in the 60-member House. The CPI won one and the Congress won the remaining 10 seats. Ahead of the 2015 Assembly elections in West Bengal, six MLAs from the Congress had quit joining the Trinamool Congress, upset by the fact that the Congress had allied with TMC in West Bengal, which made their position difficult in Tripura.

The same set of six MLAs, Sudip Roy Barman, Ashish Kumar Saha, Biswa Bandhu Sen, Pranjit Singh Roy, Dilip Sarkar and former tribal face of the Congress Hrangkhawl — joined the BJP on August 2017. Thus, by acquiring six MLAs, the BJP is now the main opposition party in the state.

The fight between the BJP and the Left goes beyond the electoral numbers. It is a fight of two divergent ideologies. While the Congress was just a political rival, for the 20-year-old Left Front government in Tripura, this is the first time they would be waging an ideological battle as well.

Though Tripura election results won’t have much of an impact in the larger scheme of things, in the Left’s tryst with democracy, Manik Sarkar would certainly rise up the ranks if he manages to keep the BJP at bay.

No wonder his party secretary, too, has already sounded the poll bugle, calling Tripura Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘waterloo moment’.

By megha