Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Manipur and now Tripura. The Bharatiya Janata Party is eyeing this tiny state in Northeast, which has been the left’s bastion for last two decades, to begin its ruling.
Six MLAs of Trinamool Congress have defected to join the BJP. One Congress MLA has also reportedly showed his interest to join the saffron party.
The lone Congress legislator Ratan Lal Nath had voted for Ram Nath Kovind during the presidential election defying his party's nominee. “It’s a matter of time for me to leave Congress,” said Nath.
Sudip Roy Barman, the disgruntled TMC legislator who led the coup in TMC, has also declared that around seven CPI(M) legislators are with him.
“We will definitely break the CPI(M) and other Left parties. Next year election, we will give a befitting reply to the CPI(M) and it would be wiped out of Tripura,” Barman told THE WEEK.
Barman and others had defected to Trinamool Congress last year when Congress and CPI(M) allied before the West Bengal assembly election.
He said before joining the TMC the legislators had a talk with BJP president Amit Shah but they decided not to join the saffron party considering its caste and religious order.
But the UP election turned the table, which showed that BJP even could get votes from the Muslim majority areas.
“When we saw Mamata Banerjee joined hands with CPI(M) to defeat Ram Nath Kovind, we decided to severe all track from her. She is an opportunist politician,” said he.
Sources told THE WEEK that the BJP used Mukul Roy, a Trinamool Congress MP, who has been indicted in both Saradha and Narada scam.
Mukul Roy refused to pick up the phone call. But a leader of the Trinamool Congress has confirmed that BJP leaders in Delhi held several rounds of meetings with Roy.
“We fear Roy might engineer split in the party in Bengal as well,” said the leader.
BJP sources have confirmed that the party has already begun its mission to grab power in states which go to poll in 2018. Odisha and Tripura are up on the list.
The party would not like to project chief ministers in these two states but will look for more leaders from each of these states to join them. While they have Dharmendra Pradhan in Odisha, they would be missing right person to lead the election in Tripura.
However, senior leader and national secretary Rahul Sinha said that there would be no dearth of leaders in Tripura.
“We fight election based on ideology. Leaders will ultimately come and with existing leaders we will win election,” said Sinha.
Tripura will be the litmus test for the BJP. If BJP could grab the power from left in this largely Bengali speaking state, it would create a new hope for them. The saffron party understands its acceptance among the Bengalis and would jump to conquer Bengal in 2021.
The North East Democratic Alliance, led by the Congressman-turned-BJP leader and deputy chief minister of Assam, Himant Biswa Sharma, with the advice of Ram Madhav, is speeding up the process of unifying the BJP with many other like minded parties in Tripura.
But many believe it would be a difficult nut to crack. Especially when the man in the opposite side is Manik Sarkar, one of the longest serving chief ministers of India.
