“Khela hobe, khela hobe,
Tripurate khela hobe
Tripura koitase, Mamata di aitase
Chal, chal sobai mile Trinamool-e jai…”
(The game is on in Tripura; Tripura says Mamata is coming; let us all go to Trinamool).
The Trinamool Congress is heading for the Northeast with a song that put the BJP out of tune in West Bengal. With all precincts counted, the next target of chief minister Mamata Banerjee and her party is the Bengali-majority Tripura that votes a new assembly in 2023 and where the ruling BJP’s stocks are said to be falling. And the TMC is singing from the same song sheet for the Tripura operation—well almost, by releasing an adaptation of its popular Bengal campaign number Khela hobe in the dialect spoken in Tripura.
The TMC declared its intent for the northeastern state that was a Communist bastion—like Bengal before Mamata—till the BJP ended its Leftist rule of more than three decades in 2018. In Tripura, the TMC had established a unit in 1998, but it never got off the blocks, barring briefly when it poached six Congress MLAs in 2016. Trinamool leader Mukul Roy—who broke ranks with Mamata, joined the BJP, and is back in the TMC fold—effected those defections. Roy wooed those six legislators to the BJP when he switched sides in 2017. It is expected that he would be able to lure the group back to the TMC.
“We were reduced to nothing. But after our victory in West Bengal, people here see hope in Mamata Didi. They want change after the BJP’s three years of non-governance,” says Asish Lal Singh, president of the TMC’s Tripura unit. Singh, son of the state’s first chief minister, Sachindra Lal Singh, says several MLAs were in touch with the party. He asserts that he stands for a chief minister from the indigenous tribal community, who are pushed to the periphery of Tripura’s political and economic space since Bengali-speaking immigrants from Bangladesh made Tripura their home in droves. Twenty of the 60 assembly seats are reserved for tribals, while they are said to hold sway in 12 more.
For its part, the BJP is grappling with dissent against chief minister Biplab Kumar Deb for his alleged “autocratic” ways and failure to deliver on promises made ahead of the 2018 elections. Sharp differences within the party sprang up last October when five-time MLA Sudip Roy Barman— one of the six who joined the TMC and then the BJP—led a group of legislators to Delhi seeking a leadership change. Matters reached such a pass that Deb decided last December to ask the people if they were okay with him being the CM. The BJP central leadership shot down the idea. More headaches surfaced when the BJP and ally IPFT lost elections to the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council in April.
As the plot thickened, the TMC marched into the game, stirring the BJP central leadership to send three central leaders to douse the fire in Agartala. “All’s well,” Barman says. “There is no dissidence…. All this hype about TMC is nothing but Mukul Roy’s mischief.” His confidence doesn’t match reports that suggest the “dissidents” may not agree to anything less than a leadership change. The khela is truly on.
By Dipankar Roy in Guwahati
