Thumping win for BJP in Tripura, TIPRA beats Cong-CPM alliance

Agartala: The ruling BJP secured an impressive victory and returned to office in Tripura by winning 32 of the 60 assembly seats, single-handedly crossing the halfway mark. Its ally, IPFT won one of the five seats it contested, raising the BJP-IPFT tally to 33.The surprise of the election, however, was TIPRA Motha emerging as the main opposition with 13 members. The CPI(M) won 11 seats after contesting 44, and other constituents of the Left Front — RSP, Forward Bloc and CPI — came out empty-handed though they fought one each.Congress, which contested 13 seats after striking a seat-sharing agreement with the Left, won only three.All the BJP ministers, along with the speaker and deputy speaker, won but the party received a jolt as deputy chief minister Jishnu Dev Varma lost Charilam seat to TIPRA Motha’s Subodh Debbarma by 651 votes. In 2018, Dev Varma had won this seat by 25,000 votes, the highest then.BJP's tally fell four short of its 2018 score, while IPFT is down from eight seats in 2018 to one.BJP president Rajib Bhattacharjee lost Banamalipur constituency by a margin of 1,253 votes to veteran Congress leader Gopal Roy, and BJP general secretary Papiya Datta lost to Congress stalwart Sudip Roybarman by 8,162 votes.BJP general secretaries Kishore Barman and Tinku Roy won Nalchar and Chandipur seats by margins of 2,508 and 620 votes respectively. Union minister of state for empowerment and social justice, Pratima Bhowmik, won Dhanpur seat by 3,440 votes.IPFT’s lone winner, Shukla Charan Noatia, wrested Julaibari seat, a Left stronghold. CPI(M) state secretary Jitendra Chaudhury, Congress president Birjit Sinha and MLA Sudip Roybarman won their seats.Trinamool Congress contested 28 seats in Tripura but had a disastrous outing. Nearly every Trinamool candidate forfeited their security deposit although West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, party national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee, and a number of Tollywood stars had campaigned in Tripura.The party, blamed for cutting into anti-BJP votes across the country, was once again put under the lens in Ramnagar constituency of Agartala, where the BJP candidate, sitting MLA Surajit Datta, won by a margin of 1,042 votes, defeating the LF-Congress-supported independent candidate Purushottam Roybarman. Trinamool candidate Pujan Biswas polled 2,042 votes, easing the win for BJP.The seat-sharing agreement between CPI(M) and Congress ended up being a disaster for both parties. The alliance fielded candidates in 56 seats but was able to win only one-third of them. TIPRA Motha won more seats than them at a better strike rate as it contested 42 seats.