Tripura Bypoll Result Reiterates To Trinamool That Mamata Banerjee Has Zero Appeal Beyond Bengal’s Borders

The results of the June 23 byelections to four Assembly constituencies in Tripura held out an important message to the Trinamool, and one that the party would do well to heed.

Despite investing a lot of political capital in the northeastern state and sending its top leaders, including Abhishek Banerjee to campaign there, the party’s candidates in the four constituencies could not even save their security deposits.

The Trinamool candidates came a poor fourth in all the four constituencies and the party’s vote share came to a miserable 2.8 per cent. The bypolls have shown that the Trinamool is a marginal player in Tripura.

The Tripura results have shown that all the tall talks by Trinamool leaders, including Abhishek Banerjee, that their party is poised to unseat the BJP from power in the Assembly elections next year and the bypolls would serve as a curtain-raiser to that was a lot of hot air.

Abhishek, in fact, led his party’s campaign in Tripura and boasted that the Trinamool would win all the four seats. He also ran down the Left Front and the Congress while claiming that the Trinamool is the only party capable of taking on the BJP in the state.

Apart from its 'crown prince', the Trinamool had also deployed a galaxy of its top leaders, including Bengal cabinet ministers, to conduct a high-voltage campaign in the northeastern state.

But all those efforts proved to be pointless with the party coming nowhere close to even a respectable defeat. In Agartala, which the Congress won, the Trinamool candidate got a pathetic 2.1 per cent of the votes polled.

In Jubarajnagar, Trinamool's Mrinal Kanti Debnath polled 2.98 per cent of the votes cast while in Surma, Trinamool’s Arjun Namasudra bagged 3.4 per cent of votes. In Town-Bardowali, Sanhita Bhattacharya of the Trinamool got 2.96 per cent of the votes.

This is the second time that the Trinamool has faced total humiliation in Tripura. In the civic polls held late last year, the Trinamool bagged just one seat of the 120 it fielded candidates from. Elections were held in 222 wards in one municipal corporation, 13 municipal councils and six nagar panchayats in the state, and the BJP swept the polls by winning 217 of the 222 seats. The BJP had already bagged 112 wards uncontested.

Soon after its spectacular victory in the 2021 Assembly polls in Bengal, the Trinamool started dreaming of spreading its wings beyond Bengal. It set its sights on Tripura, and for obvious reasons. Bengalis form a majority of about 64 per cent of the state’s population and the Trinamool assumed that the Bengalis of Tripura would become as enamoured of Mamata Banerjee as their counterparts in Bengal.

The Trinamool encouraged defections from the Congress to build a base in the northeastern state. A number of disgruntled and inconsequential functionaries from the Congress were drafted in and top Trinamool leaders started frequenting Tripura.

Trinamool chairperson Mamata Banerjee started fancying herself as a ‘national’ leader who, alone, could take on the BJP. The Trinamool knew that it would have to expand beyond Bengal if its party chief’s ‘national ambitions’ were to bear fruit.

But the Tripura civic poll results in end-November last year not only came as a rude jolt to the Trinamool, they also served as a reality check for the party. But undeterred by its failure in Tripura, the Trinamool set its sights on Goa where polls were held in mid-February this year.

There, too, the Trinamool inducted senior and middle-rung leaders from the Congress and launched a high-voltage campaign against the BJP. Mamata Banerjee herself visited the state, which was plastered with life-size cutouts of the Bengal chief minister, to campaign.

Trinamool’s hired political strategist Prashant Kishor and his Indian Political Action Committee (IPAC) were deployed to Goa to help the Trinamool. Huge sums of money were spent on campaign and publicity and the Trinamool projected itself as a natural claimant for power in the coastal state.

Mamata Banerjee assumed that her strategy of offering sops to the electorate would work in Goa in the same way that it did in Bengal last year. She also did her best to unite the Christians, who form a little over 25 per cent of the coastal state’s population, behind the Trinamool and also divide the Hindus. This strategy--of uniting the minority community and dividing the majority community--worked in Bengal for her and so she assumed it could be replicated in Goa also.

But none of that worked and the Trinamool drew a blank in Goa. It could bag only 5.2 per cent of the votes cast and faced the ignominy of even its minor ally--the Maharashtrawadi Gomantak Party which was allotted just 13 seats to contest from--winning more seats (two). The Congress, which the Trinamool and its acerbic chairperson repeatedly dubbed as a ‘dead’ party bagged 11 seats and even the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) got two seats.

And despite all the high-decibel attacks that Mamata Banerjee and her party launched against the BJP, the saffron party emerged as the single-largest party in Goa and went on to form the government.

But successive defeats do nothing to dampen the Trinamool’s fantastical dreams. The setback it faced in Goa (and before that in Tripura) did not deter the Trinamool’s political managers from investing huge resources in Tripura once again for the bypolls.

A few Trinamool seniors camped in state capital Agartala for weeks to steer the party’s campaign there and facilitate easy transfer of resources from Bengal to the northeastern state. And the Trinamool’s poll campaign was typically acerbic and shrill.

All that fell flat and the Trinamool once again stood badly defeated.

The impending defeat of Trinamool’s former vice-president, Yashwant Sinha, in the forthcoming presidential elections, will also serve as a strong reiteration of the message. But chances are that the Trinamool will ignore the message and continue to fancy itself as a ‘national’ entity.