AGARTALA: The opposition CPI(M) on Friday rejected TIPRA Motha Party’s second straight TTAADC General Election win as any reflection of a genuine public mandate, with Tripura State Secretary Jitendra Chaudhury alleging that the result was manufactured through black money, pre-poll violence, and a tribal-non-tribal divide deliberately engineered by ruling partners Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and TIPRA Motha.
Chaudhury spoke at a press conference in Agartala after a two-day Tripura State Committee meeting attended by CPI(M) General Secretary M.A. Baby and Politburo member Mohammed Salim. The BJP candidate had also retained the Dharmanagar Assembly seat in the by-poll held around the same period.
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“This victory has no connection whatsoever to any positive work done for the people of the ADC areas over the past five years,” Chaudhury said. “It is entirely about division. They spread fears that ADC land would be seized and ADC languages destroyed, while two parties sitting in the same government created this climax between themselves and won through confusion.”
He noted that the Left Front had swept all 28 TTAADC seats across three consecutive elections between 2005 and 2015, at times securing as much as 64 per cent of the vote. “None of those elections were accompanied by this kind of violence, black money and uncertainty,” he said. “Such things never happened before.”
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Chaudhury described the outcome as “in no way democratic, in no way a healthy and conscientious verdict of the electorate,” adding that the ADC was built at the cost of hundreds of martyrs to protect the language, culture and economic welfare of Tripura’s tribal population. “This victory has no relation to those ideals,” he said.
CPI(M) General Secretary M.A. Baby, speaking in English, pointed to the broader pattern. “One of the key reasons for the challenges we face is the reactionary operation of identity politics, pitting one section of people against another through tribal and non-tribal rivalry,” he said.
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The party welcomed the Supreme Court’s directive ordering village committee elections in ADC areas, which were already five years overdue, and called on all secular and democratic forces to ensure the polls are not reduced to a repeat of the same manipulations. “We will expose this in the days ahead,” Chaudhury said.
