From Our Special Correspondent
GUWAHATI: The Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura (IPFT), an ally in the BJP-led coalition government in Tripura, has decided to fight the three-tier panchayat elections alone and would contest in at least one-fourth of the total seats.
The state election commission has scheduled the panchayat elections on July 27 and counting of votes on July 31.
The elections will be held for 6,111 gram panchayat seats, 419 panchayat samiti seats and 116 zilla parishad seats.
“We will go alone and fight the elections in at least one-fourth seats. We have a strong presence in the rural areas and are going to declare our candidates after some days. Our preparations for the polls are going on well,” IPFT spokesperson, Mangal Debbarma told The Shillong Times on Monday.
IPFT had contested the elections to the two Lok Sabha seats in the state alone as well, but could not perform as expected.
A central-committee meeting of the party held recently discussed threadbare issues of the party’s performance in the parliamentary elections.
The party’s state conference will be held from July 6-7, where a final strategy would be chalked out for the polls after discussion of all pending issues .
Meanwhile, the ruling BJP has already declared candidates for 5,127 seats of gram panchayats, 280 candidates for panchayat samitis and 82 candidates for zila parishads.
The ruling party has said that it was in talks with IPFT leaders over an alliance for the rural polls but no headway has been made yet.
The two opposition parties – Congress and CPI (M) – are yet to declare candidates for the polls.