IT IS a bright but wintry morning in Agartala. In the past five years, the city has changed a lot. The Maharaja Bir Bikram Airport, near the India-Bangladesh border, has added a new terminal with sophisticated facilities and glitzy outlets. It is no longer the messy airport where passengers had to take a long walk to the arrival gate; it has become one of the best in the country.
Agartala has become livelier. Once a sleepy city, it is now a blaze of light in the evenings. Malls have sprung up, branded eateries have opened shop, and dance bars spice up weekends―changes that were unimaginable five years ago. The city has also become one of the cleanest in the northeast. The streets are well-lit, and the one leading to the chief minister’s bungalow is no longer named Marx-Engels Sarani; it has been renamed Syama Prasad Mookerjee Road.
Surely, people must be happy with the progress? No, says Liton Saha, a young cabdriver. Saha is a member of the Students’ Federation of India, affiliated to the CPI(M). The party was voted out of power in 2018, after having ruled the state for 25 years. Saha admits that things were so bad in 2018 that even he wanted the CPI(M) to lose. But under the BJP, he says, things have taken a turn for the worse, despite progress on the development front. “This government must go,” he says. “It is nothing but a symbol of atrocities. The Congress and the CPI(M) must come to power to give relief to the people.”
Saha says he and his comrades were continuously attacked by BJP workers when Biplab Kumar Deb was chief minister from 2018 to 2022. “They looted our comrades, and beat up our women. Even the elderly did not get any respite,” he says. “It did not stop there―they even blocked us from voting in the municipal polls. Our votes were cast even before we could reach the polling booth. It is now time to pay them back in the same coin.”
According to Saha, thousands of left activists will come together on election day (February 17) to guard polling booths and push back the saffron brigade, if need be. Does that mean that the polls would be bloody? “It will be, and only the BJP will be responsible for it,” he says.
The anger in the streets is genuine, says political observer Sekhar Dutta. “Even the left front wasn’t as unpopular as the Deb government was,” says Dutta. “Deb used the administration to come down hard on his political opponents. Development was put on the back-burner. Worse, the BJP national leadership paid no heed to complaints of the common people. By the time Deb was removed and Manik Saha was made chief minister, it was too late.”
Known as a suave gentleman, Saha, 70, has been trying to put an end to political violence. “He could have become an asset for the party had he been made chief minister at least two years earlier,” says Dutta. “He has taken desperate steps in the last 10 months to improve the BJP’s condition.”
Saha is a dentist by training and a former Congress leader. Before he entered active politics, he used to teach at the Tripura Medical College and was denied promotion because he was a member of the Congress’s medical cell. He quit the Congress and joined the BJP in 2016, and was made state party president in 2020.
The BJP does not usually declare its chief minister candidate before elections, but it has made an exception in Saha’s case. A member of the BJP state committee said Saha is a tough administrator who understands Tripura’s problems. Many people, however, consider him a political lightweight.
Also, the BJP seems to have sent a wrong signal by appointing Rajib Bhattacharjee, who was allegedly involved in the ransacking of the CPI(M) state committee office in Agartala in 2021, as state party president. According to a CPI(M) leader, the party office and the statue of former chief minister Dasarath Deb were burnt during the violence. “The party leadership spent a lot to renovate the office and erect a fresh statue of Deb. But the partymen remain angry and vengeful,” says the leader.
This time, the CPI(M) has joined hands with the Congress to defeat the BJP. Former chief minister Manik Sarkar, who had long opposed any understanding with the Congress, has accepted the alliance and decided not to contest the polls. A third force is the Tipra Motha, a party that is influential in the tribal belt and is led by Pradyot Manikya Debbarma, member of the erstwhile royal family of Tripura. The Trinamool Congress, which had been trying to make inroads in the state, has surprisingly given up. Its most important leader, Subal Bhowmik, has returned to the BJP.
Opposition leaders say political violence is the most important poll issue. “Yes, there has been development in the past five years, but the government has failed to bring peace after the communist rule,” says Congress leader Sudip Roy Barman, who had joined the BJP in 2017 to bring down the left government. Barman became minister in the Biplab Deb government, but quit the BJP and returned to the Congress in 2022 after realising that the saffron brigade was “1,000 per cent worse than the communists”.
Together, the Congress and the CPI(M) may pose a formidable challenge, but apparently what really worries the BJP is the rise of the Tipra Motha. The tribal areas are part of the Autonomous District Council (ADC). The Tipra Motha had won 18 of 28 seats in the last ADC polls in 2021. The BJP won nine seats and its partner, the Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura (IPFT), drew a blank.
“It was a blunder; this time, we are contesting the majority of seats in ADC areas,” says Binod Debbarma, tribal leader and BJP candidate. “The BJP is as popular in ADC areas as it is in towns and rural, Bengali-speaking areas.”
But there are signs that all is not well in the BJP. Mala Debbarma, who was part of the BJP’s Scheduled Tribes Morcha, recently joined the Tipra Motha. “The BJP avoided dealing with developmental issues in tribal areas,” says Mala. “It always tried to play second fiddle to the IPFT. So they paid a heavy price. Now, under the present leadership of the Tipra Motha, we are demanding that ADC areas be made into a separate state called Tipraland.”
On its part, the BJP will tom-tom its development initiatives. Anjali Deb, a worker in a government-run tea estate near Agartala, says her wages improved during the BJP rule. “It went up from 1110 to 1176 today. We have medical facilities, and I receive bonus thrice a year. There was no bonus during the previous government’s time,” she says. Anjali is in her fifties; she has a daughter who also works in a government-run tea estate.
Rajen Tanti, who works at a private tea plantation, says the BJP government has been prompt in dealing with labour disputes. “It took over the management of ailing private plantations and ran them efficiently without allowing the unions to create labour unrest,” he says.
But the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), affiliated to the CPI(M), says the state of the labour sector is “devastating”. “We are not allowed to do union work in tea gardens or other industries. BJP workers are ruthless; they attacked our union leader’s house. Many leaders have left the state and are unable to return to their homes,” says Sankar Dutta, CITU secretary.
Saha is campaigning hard to convince voters that giving him another term is in their interest. He raised salaries of government employees, increased the average wage of day labourers, upgraded the Tripura Medical College, and set up a dental medical college and nursing institute in Agartala. He has also proposed super-speciality hospitals in each of Tripura’s four districts. Banners across the state showing Saha with Prime Minister Narendra Modi have helped raise the chief minister’s profile.
Saha had started out in the BJP as a panna pramukh (booth-level head). Ram Lal, who was the party’s national general secretary in charge of organisation, was impressed by Saha and played a key role in his rise. Saha was instrumental in the BJP’s poll victory in 2018, and was made state party president two years later. His ascent to the chief minister’s chair, however, was delayed amid uncertainty and disgruntlement in the party.
Apparently, the infighting in the party leadership came to the fore again recently. Supporters of Deb wanted to keep the door open for the former chief minister’s return, but the Saha camp batted for consistency in governance. Union Home Minister Amit Shah put an end to the tussle by visiting Agartala and declaring that the next BJP government would be a “Modi-Manik” one.
The Congress’s Barman, however, says Saha alone cannot save the BJP. “He is my family dentist. He is an able man, and a very good human being. But I am afraid the BJP would not allow him to work,” he says.
Saha, however, is confident that he would be victorious. “I am not here to become chief minister by unfair means,” he says. “I am here to bring change in Tripura with the help of the prime minister. I have spent my life fighting the communists, and I continue to fight them.”