Trinamul eyes last Left den Tripura

Calcutta, July 23: Mamata Banerjee is trying to breach the Left’s last bastion, Tripura, by launching a “sustained anti-Left campaign” with an eye on the 2013 Assembly elections.

The CPM-led Left Front has been in power in the northeastern state since 1993, winning four elections in a row. The Trinamul Congress is yet to open its account in the 60-member Assembly.

Mamata has asked two of her party’s junior central ministers, Mukul Roy and Sultan Ahmed, and several other Trinamul MPs to address a rally in Tripura’s capital Agartala on August 20 under the banner of the Tripura Pradesh Trinamul Congress. The move is aimed at testing the political waters in the state and creating the ground for Trinamul to gain a foothold there.

The decision to hold a rally was taken following a string of meetings between the Bengal chief minister and Manik Deb, the Tripura Trinamul president. Deb had arrived in Calcutta with around 50 party functionaries to attend Mamata’s Brigade rally on Thursday.

“Mamatadi told me that she planned to launch a Bengal-like movement in Tripura to put an end to the CPM’s two-decade misrule in our state,” Deb said this afternoon.

He said Trinamul was planning to organise in Tripura this year-end a rally like the one in Brigade. “We will request Mamatadi to visit Tripura and address the rally. We hope to organise a rally as big as the July 21 Brigade meeting,” Deb added.

Tripura chief minister and CPM politburo member Manik Sarkar denied Trinamul’s allegations of misrule. “You better visit Tripura and see for yourself the ground reality here. Trinamul is talking about misrule because it has no knowledge about the prevailing situation here,” he said.

Trinamul’s Roy, the junior shipping minister, said the August 20 Agartala rally would be the “launch pad for a sustained movement against the terror unleashed by the CPM in Tripura”. “Our landslide victory in the Bengal Assembly polls has proved that the CPM can be ousted through a sustained movement against its anti-people policies,” he said.

Roy, Trinamul’s all-India general secretary, said the movement, on the lines of the one that put an end to the Left’s 34-year rule in Bengal, would “carry on till March 2013, when Tripura goes to polls”. The Left also lost power in Kerala in this Assembly elections but it was a close contest between the Left and the Congress-led front.

Trinamul plans to contest the Tripura Assembly elections in alliance with the Congress as it had done in Bengal, Roy said. “We welcome the Congress to join our movement in Tripura,” he added.

The Congress has 10 Assembly seats in the state while its ally, the Indigenous Nationalist Party of Tripura, has one.

Trinamul does not have any elected representative in the panchayats and the civic bodies in Tripura. “It’s true that Trinamul is not a force to reckon with in Tripura as we lost all the Assembly seats we contested in the 2008 polls. But we have several party units there. Also, our success in Bengal will stand us in good stead in the Assembly elections here,” Deb said.

He said the Congress was a “bigger force” in the northeastern state than Trinamul. “But the Congress is a divided force here. State Congress president Subhojit Dutta has testy ties with several MLAs of his party,” Deb said.

Dutta, however, denied Deb’s claim. “Trinamul does not exist in Tripura. It is talking about collaborating with us but how can we tie up with a party that is non-existent here?” Dutta asked.

In Assam, Trinamul’s efforts to gain a foothold have received a jolt with Joseph Toppo, the lone Asom Gana Parishad MP, refusing to defect to the party.