The Assembly elections in Tripura are at the end of the month. The Congress in the state which has got a drubbing from the Left Front for twenty years hoped that someone like Mamata Banerjee could galvanize it to action and lead it back to power. It hoped that change could come in the Northeastern state as it did in West Bengal. But with West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee out of the Congress-led UPA, its hopes have been dashed to the ground. The elevation of Pranab Mukherjee as President of India and the absence of Priya Ranjan Das Munshi are also having an adverse impact on the party’s poll campaign. Priya Ranjan Das Munshi had a through grasp of political realities in Tripura. The state Congress is riven with infighting. Leaders of the Pradesh Congress Committee’s tribal department have resigned to fight as Independents. The local Congress is however geared for a fight and has charged the Left Front government with “corruption, nepotism, mis-governance and arrogance”.
All this has not caused a flutter in the Left Front headquarters. Chief Minister Manik Sarkar spends an hour everyday closeted with top colleagues after campaigning. The indications are that his party is headed for a win for the seventh time. Although Sarkar used to say that he took his cue from Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, he did not raise a hornets’ nest like the latter. Sarkar avoided forcible acquisition of land and rejected any proposal for SEZs. He developed the state economy adopting a cluster system which caused no acrimony. He also focused on sericulture, pisci-culture and handicrafts avoiding an industrialization overdrive. Under him, Tripura tea got a boost as well. The reason he is sitting pretty is that he stayed away from big-bang changes which knocked the CPI (M) out of power in West Bengal and Kerala.
