AGARTALA, April 1 – Battle lines are drawn for the elections to the two Lok Sabha constituencies in Tripura with candidates of the ruling Left Front, who won in the last general elections, looking to increase their margins when the elections are held in the State on April 22, reports PTI. In the 1999 elections, CPI-M candidate Samar Chowdhuri contesting from the West Tripura constituency defeated his nearest rival from Trinamool Congress Sudhir Ranjan Majumder, former Chief Minister of Tripura by a margin of 1,98,399 votes.
The same result was achieved by the CPI-M in the East Tripura (Reserve) constituency where Bajuban Reang, defeated his nearest BJP rival Jishn Debbarma by over a margin of 1,50,500 votes. The CPI-M is upbeat and was confident of increasing its winning margins because of the severing of ties by the INPT, a tribal party, with the Congress, the main Opposition party in Tripura.
The INPT has now joined the National Democratic Alliance as its constituent. The Tripura Upajati Juba Samity, the Tripura National Volunteers, an insurgent group-turned-political party, and the Tripura Hill People’s Party (THPP) merged in February 2002 to form the INPT and it fought the last Assembly elections in February 2003 as an alliance partner of Congress.
There are every possibility of Congress votes getting split with one of its factions the Trinamool Congress trying to make inroads into the Congress votebanks. Though the Trinamool Congress together with the INPT and the BJP has agreed on putting common candidates against the ruling Left Front’s, things are not as rosy as they seem within the NDA that they constitute, observers say.
Tripura BJP unit president Ranajoy Deb at one point had refused to even share a joint platform with Bijoy Hrangkhawl, the INPT president and former insurgent leader who signed a peace treaty with New Delhi in 1988 after eight years in jungle, arguing that the latter still continued to support insurgency. Deb had also criticised the Central leadership of the BJP for allowing Bijoy Hrangakhawl’s INPT into the NDA.