AGARTALA, Sept 21: The opposition CPI (M) in Tripura has been urging “anti-BJP and secular forces” to stitch a political alliance to defeat the saffron party’s “anti-people and anti-Constitutional activities”, CPI (M) state secretary, Jitendra Choudhury said on Tuesday.
Veteran Communist leader Choudhury, told PTI on Tuesday that Congress must read the writing on the wall or else it will be isolated further.
“We don’t want to forge any ‘opportunist alliance’ but favour cementing a political alliance with secular forces. Later, an electoral alliance can be wrought to defeat the BJP.
“We have been urging the anti-BJP secular forces to launch political programmes exposing the saffron party’s anti-people, anti-democratic and anti-constitutional activities”, Choudhury told PTI.
Senior Congress leader Sudip Roy Barman on Monday had announced that the party will leave no stone unturned to defeat the saffron party in the elections, due in 2023, an affirmation which was seen as indicative of extending a hand towards the CPI(M) and the new tribal party TIPRA led by former royal Prodyot Kishore Deb Barman.
“We will do everything to defeat the saffron party,” Roy Barman had said in a query if the Congress is ready to tie up with the CPI (M) in the next Assembly elections.
Pointing out that the wave in favour of the BJP during the 2018 state polls “no longer exists in Tripura”, the CPI(M) leader claimed, “Now, its vote share has been reduced to only 20 per cent due to their misrule during the past four and half years”.
The BJP-IPFT alliance had swept the 2018 Tripura Assembly polls winning a two-third majority in the 60-member House, thereby ending 25-year-long Left rule in the north-eastern state.
“They (BJP workers) are trying to distribute black money and resorting to muscle power to win the 2023 Assembly elections”, the former MP from CPI(M) alleged.
In the 2018 Assembly, around 40 vote share of Congress was shifted to the BJP, while the saffron party had pulled less than 2 per cent vote in the 2013 Assembly elections.
The saffron party had snatched around 7 per cent vote share from CPI(M) -led Left Front taking its total vote share to 44 per cent in the 2018 election.
The CPI(M) vote share fell from 52 per cent to 45 per cent while the Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura (IPFT) bagged 7 per cent vote.
In the 60-member Assembly, the BJP has 36 MLAs while its ally IPFT has seven legislators and the CPI(M) has 15 MLAs. Congress won one seat in the recently concluded bye-election.
Rebel IPFT MLA Brishaketu Deb Barma, who tendered his resignation last year as a member of the Tripura Assembly, was declared disqualified for not following the rules of resignation, Speaker Ratan Chakraborty said on Tuesday.
With Deb Barma’s disqualification, the strength of IPFT has come down from eight to seven. (PTI)
