BJP Maintains Dominance Over Tripura, Wins Three Seats While Congress Bags One

The BJP has won three of the four Assembly seats in Tripura to which byelections were held Thursday (June 23).

Incumbent chief minister Dr Manik Saha won the Town Bardowali seat by a handsome margin of 6,104 votes over his nearest Congress rival Ashish Kumar Saha.

BJP’s Malina Debnath trounced CPI(M)’s Shailendra Chandra Nath by 4,572 votes to wrest the Jubrajnagar seat from the Marxists.

The BJP retained the Surma Assembly seat where its candidate, Swapna Das Pal, defeated the CPI(M)’s Anjan Das by 3,278 votes.

The Congress won the Agartala seat where its candidate, Sudip Roy Burman, defeated BJP’s Dr Ashok Sinha by a little over 3,000 votes.

The results of the by-polls comes as a major morale booster for the BJP ahead of next year’s Assembly elections. The win in Town Bardowali is particularly heartening for the saffron party since Manik Saha, who replaced Biplab Deb only in mid-May, was making his electoral debut.

The electoral battle in Bardowali was a prestigious one. The constituency was won by Ashish Kumar Saha in 2018, but he was contesting on a BJP ticket that time. Ashish Saha defeated Biswanath Saha of the Forward Bloc (a constituent of the Left Front in Tripura) by a big margin of 11,178 votes four years ago.

But Saha, along with his mentor Sudip Roy Burman, resigned from the BJP and returned to the Congress--they had left the Congress and joined the BJP ahead of the 2018 Assembly elections-- in February this year. The by-election to this seat was necessitated by Ashish Saha’s defection from the BJP to the Congress.

Ashish Saha’s defeat was a humiliating one since his victory margin in 2018 was the third-highest in the state. He had polled 24,293 votes in 2018. This time, he managed to get only 10,766 votes.

The by-election to the Agartala seat was also necessitated by the defection of Sudip Roy Burman from the BJP to the Congress. Sudip Roy Burman won Agartala constituency on a BJP ticket in 2018 by a margin of 7,382 votes. But though he retained the seat this time, his victory margin has come down considerably to a little over 3,000 votes.

The BJP’s win in Jubranagar is also significant. This seat was won by the CPI(M)’s Ramendra Chandra Debnath in 2018. The CPI(M) candidate defeated his nearest BJP rival, Jadab Lal Debnath, by a narrow margin of 649 votes.

This time, the BJP not only defeated the CPI(M) in Jubrajnagar, but it also won the seat by a handsome margin of 4,572 votes.

In Surma, the BJP has increased its winning margin. The BJP’s Ashish Das defeated his nearest CPI(M) rival, Anjan Das, in Surma in 2018 by a margin of 2,710 votes. This time, BJP’s Swapna Das Pal trounced the CPI(M)’s Anjan Das by 3278 votes.

The BJP has also increased its overall vote share in the four seats to nearly 45 per cent, up from 43.5 per cent in 2018. The Left Front trailed much behind in second place with less than a 22 per cent vote share while the Congress came third with a 20.10 percent vote share. The Trinamool lagged way behind with a pathetic 2.8 per cent vote share.