Senior Trinamool Congress (TMC) leaders in West Bengal are deeply embarrassed by the unacceptably poor performance of their party in the recent Tripura Assembly by-elections. They have been remarkably reticent on the issue, not least because the humiliation they face is directly attributable to party second-in-command Abhishek Banerjee MP. For the record, the TMC contested all four Tripura seats up for grabs and carried out an expensive, high-octane campaign. The result – it managed to garner a mere 2.72% of the aggregate votes, failing to win a single seat. Moreover, all four TMC candidates lost their security deposits. Two of the candidates ended up winning fewer than 1000 votes, while the other two barely managed to cross the 1,000 figure. In sharp contrast, the ruling BJP won 45.73% of the votes polled, the CPI(M) 20.76%, Congress 24.80%, and the Forward Bloc 2.46%. Earlier, the TMC had won one out of 330 seats up for grabs in the municipal polls. It is another matter that currently, the lone former TMC winner is a BJP member, having switched sides as he followed familiar northeastern political traditions. The point is, that the TMC had won a respectable 23% (approximately) share of popular votes, much of this coming from Agartala urban areas and the adjacent semi-urban pockets.
Agartala-based analysts have already provided an answer of sorts to the question, in the absence of any explanation from either Mamata Banerjee or anyone else. They refer to the victory of ex-BJP leader local veteran Sudip Roy Burman who contested the by-polls on a Congress ticket this time. He won from the Town Bordowali seat in the by-polls. Despite carrying out an often difficult campaign, Burman won over his nearest BJP rival with a fairly comfortable margin in a prestige contest of sorts. The point is, that Roy Burman had been functioning as a dissident within the BJP for some time. More to the point, he had helped the TMC carry out its campaign for the municipal polls, providing it with valuable inputs regarding specific areas, the complexities, and nuances of local grassroots politics, well as incisive insights about the candidates in the fray. However, this time it was different, as Roy Burman switched over to Congress from the BJP, deserting the TMC. He explained his preference to join the old party instead of the TMC because he felt the latter was interested only in helping the BJP through its tactics of cutting into the votes won by secular parties like those in the Left Front and Congress. As he explained to Agartala-based newspersons, his fight was against the BJP for its misrule and corruption, not to help it.
Again, the BJP did not win 50% or more votes in any of the 4 seats, registering around 45% of the total votes. The combined votes of Congress and Left parties would have made it very difficult for the BJP to win. “This makes it clear that in Tripura, an electoral understanding would have helped a Left/Congress alliance to defeat the BJP, even in the present situation,” said one analyst. This should be properly appreciated by the secular forces in India, for future Assembly elections which are due next year. The Congress and the CPI(M) are aligned nationally against the BJP. So, it makes sense for the two parties to work for some understanding right now so that an alliance is possible to challenge BJP in the state assembly elections in 2023.
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