Despite their claims and poll alliances with Congress in the last assembly elections, the opposition Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPIM suffered a defeat in the Assembly polls in 2023.
However, instead of acknowledging their own shortcomings, including organizational weakness and a total departure from tribal areas over the years, the party is putting all the blame on the Indigenous People’s Regional Alliance (TIPRA) for the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) return to power in the state.
The CPIM believes that TIPRA’s refusal to join the Left and Congress ultimately led to BJP’s victory. The CPIM state secretary, Jitendra Choudhury, held a press conference at the party headquarters on Thursday (April 20) and stated that had TIPRA joined the Left-Congress poll platform, the BJP would have come down to single-digit as was speculated prior to the election.
Choudhury maintained that the TIPRA Motha party fielded candidates in an additional 22 seats, in addition to the 20 reserved for Scheduled Tribes (ST), for no reason. He alleged that if the Motha leaders had joined the CPIM, the results would have been different, with 31 seats for the Left-Congress and 9-11 seats for the BJP.
Choudhury claimed that TIPRA Motha, which voiced against BJP before the election, played a key role in paving the way for BJP in this election, and helped the BJP re-establish government in Tripura. He also slammed the BJP for throttling the voice of democracy during the past five years by misusing the democratic institutions of the state.
According to the analysis of the CPIM, the results for the democratic forces would have been more fruitful, and the results of the BJP would have been worse, but it did not happen because the BJP dispatched adequate cash across the state through choppers, he alleged. The CPIM’s response to its defeat puts its relevance in State politics under a scanner and raises questions about the party’s ability to introspect and take responsibility for its political strategies.
