Marxists fail to open accounts in the just concluded assembly elections

By  Firstdespatch Desk   Mar 04, 2023

Agartala, Mar 04: The Marxist parties, which had a strong hold among the tribals, constituting one third of the state’s population since the legendary leadership of the prominent Marxist tribal leader Dasharath Deb, they failed to open their accounts in the 20 tribal reserve seats.

The result of the just concluded assembly elections shows that the Marxist parties CPI (M) and CPI have failed to win even one of the twenty seats designated for the scheduled tribes for the first time since Tripura's merger with the Indian Union on October 15, 1949.

The communists had begun to gain influence in the state since the illustrious Dasharath Deb launched the "Jana Shiksha Samity" (mass literacy movement) in December 1945, which was formalized by the creation of a party unit in 1945. Following the foundation of the now-defunct Tripura Upajati Juba Samity (TUJS) in June 1967, the party's support gradually eroded, but it never looked back as the tribally dominant districts became their impregnable bastion. The party only lost two seats out of a total of 20 in the 2018 assembly elections—Jolaibari and Manu in the Sabroom subdivision—but the communist base among tribal peoples remained mostly unaffected. But this time, as a result of the tectonic shift in tribal politics, the BJP also won these two seats, bringing an end to what appeared to be the CPI-M or Marxist supremacy of tribal politics and seats.

Although "Tipra Motha" put up a strong performance and won 13 seats, the ruling BJP stole the show by taking home seven ST seats, in spite of "Tipra Motha's" anti-BJP rhetoric and bravado. The ST seats that the BJP successfully campaigned for and won in the election are: Krishnapur (Bikash Debbarma), Manu (Maylafru Mog), Bagma (Rampada Jamatya), Pecharthal (Santana Chakma), Chhawmanu (Shambhu Lal Chakma), Jolaibari (Shukla Charan Noatia-IPFT), and Santir Bazar (Pramod Reang). The most amazing aspect of the BJP's victory is that, in contrast to the "Tipra Motha" and the CPI (M), who have always prioritised the dominant Tripuri or Debbarma group, the party has made sure that all tribal populations in Tripura, particularly minority tribal communities, are represented. In the state's hilly interior, where tribal politics are just beginning to take shape, this is a significant shift. FD JK