Tripura: Left Fortress Unlikely To Be Breached

As the countdown begins for polling on 18th February for the Tripura Assembly, BJP’s heavy duty campaign in the tiny North-Eastern state has created an impression in the mainstream media that this time round, the Left fortress will be breached by the BJP. Although there are no such indications on the ground, the fawning media is giving wall to wall coverage to visits of govt. ministers (Rajnath Singh, Arun Jaitley, Nitin Gadkari and others) as also RSS bigwigs led by Ram Madhav and Sunil Deodhar, not to forget PM Modi himself.

Ground reports indicate a massive Left Front campaign spreading in every nook and cranny of the state has drawn in much larger number of people in its coverage than the BJP-IPFT alliance’s high profile campaigners. Then there is the door to door and village to village campaign by local activists of Left Front as opposed to the BJP’s campaign managed and executed by RSS ‘vistaraks’ and cadres brought in from as far away as UP and Gujarat.

In the past few years, several elections in the state have seen decisive victories for the Left Front. What is of note in these elections is that in all of them, the Left Front has got more than 50% of votes polled.

This is of key importance because many distant pundits are arguing that since Congress and TMC have got decimated BJP-IPFT will consolidate all the anti-Left votes and thus breach the fortress. Past election results show that an all-out gang-up of any kind is still not sufficient to get more votes than the Left Front.

While the last Assembly elections saw the Left Front getting 52% votes, in the 2014 general elections (where a so called Modi wave swept the BJP to power at the centre) in Tripura, the Left Front got a staggering 65% votes. This was perhaps the collapse of Congress reflected in poll results. In the three-tier panchayat polls held in December 2014, again the Left Front swept to power getting 51% of votes cast. In 2015, the Left Front swept the Tripura Tribal Autonomous Area District Council (TTAADC) elections getting 54% votes and later in the year, it handsomely won the urban local bodies elections too getting 291 of the 310 seats and 66% votes.

Although the Modi-Shah duo has inculcated a belief that elections are all about campaign management, time and again this juvenile understanding has come a cropper. Despite all micro-management and data analytics and money-powered high profile campaigning, BJP lost in Bihar and Delhi Assembly elections, and barely managed to scrape through in Gujarat recently.

In Tripura, the situation is even more difficult for the BJP because it has no cadre base, in fact no base of its own. All of its organization is recently borrowed from the TMC, which in turn got them from the discredited Congress. This is clearly reflected in the BJP’s dependence on cadre from outside the state to carry out its campaign. It is also reflected in the wild accusations of misgovernance against the Left Front, and false figures being floated by the BJP to ‘prove’ this.

Taken together, what the past record and the current campaign shows is that the BJP-IPFT alliance – in itself a shamefully opportunistic marriage of convenience – is headed for a defeat in the elections. People’s trust in good governance is far more important in elections than the razzle-dazzle of star campaigners who fly in and out.