GUWAHATI: Left parties in Tripura will stage a mass dharna at Agartala on July 18 in protest against the alleged threats to candidates of the upcoming rural polls in the state.
The Communist Party of India (Marxist) has alleged that candidates of the Opposition parties were prevented from collecting and filing nomination papers by armed gangs of the BJP during the nomination period from July 1 to 8, 2019.
“The ruling party does not want any Opposition party candidates to be in the elected bodies. As many as 121 CPI (M) candidates were threatened and forced to withdraw their nomination papers on the last day of withdrawal (July 11), which is why over 80 per cent of the panchayats have gone uncontested to the BJP,” Tripura CPI (M) spokesperson, Gautam Das told The Shillong Times on Monday.
“A similar trend was noticed in the bye-elections to the three-tier panchayats held in September 2018 when the BJP won 96 per cent of seats uncontested and during the urban polls in December when over 90 per cent of the Opposition candidates were prevented from filing nominations,” Das said.
The three-tier panchayat elections in the state are scheduled on July 27 and the Left Front has just 310 candidates in the fray for the 6,111 Gram Panchayat seats, 57 for 419 Panchayat Samiti seats and 68 candidates for 116 Zilla Parishad seats.
The CPI (M) leader said that such threats and intimidation were nothing but “murder and mockery of democracy” for which we are holding the mass dharna in the state capital.
“Through the protest we will tell the people about what the ruling party has done and to what extent they can stoop to prevent Opposition candidates from contesting the polls. In the rest of the seats, we will put up a stiff fight for which our campaigns will continue,” Das said.
The party spokesperson further recalled how the BJP had protested the rigging of panchayat elections in West Bengal and had gone to the Supreme Court regarding the matter. “A similar development can be seen in BJP-ruled Tripura as well,” he said