Propaganda and hype don’t work a long way, especially when they seek to set a narrative against a strong development model like that of Tripura. And, whenever canard and falsehood are hell bent to determine an election outcome, the voters then take the cudgel and counter them with their mandate. There is no exception for the people in Tripura.
The political hype created by Mamata Banerjee led Trinamool Congress by using West Bengal media has miserably and evidently failed to bear fruit for the party in the Tripura urban body polls.
As the results showed, the Tripura voters including the Muslims largely rejected the party that had only months ago earned infamy for its politics of violence in West Bengal. The clear rejection had been termed, and at the face of it rightly indeed, by the ruling party as a strong message -that the Tripura electors reposed faith in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ‘development model’ as put forward here by the Biplab Deb government.
Both the West Bengal based TMC leaders and their surveying partner Prashant Kishore-led I-PAC have pathetically failed to read the writings on the wall—they could hardly win one out of 222 seats that went to polls on November 25 last.
The key failure is that the TMC couldn’t even find candidates for contesting in all the seats and where they fought, they didn’t gather much response from the people even though the I-PAC team had left no stone unturned to influence the people over phone calls, social media campaigns and otherwise. According to sources, the TMC had spent a good amount of money in Tripura ahead of the local body polls apart from accommodation of the West Bengal leaders in luxurious hotels, their travel costs, expenditure for I-PAC and the poll campaign.
The West Bengal TMC leaders like Bratya Basu and Kunal Ghosh might have enjoyed their stay in Tripura with warm hospitality but, after the poll results the expenditure appeared to be a total loss for the party.
TheTripura Urban Body election was important and it assumed significance in the emerging political scenario, especially when Mamata Banerjee started projecting her as the key face against Prime Minister Narendra Modi for the 2024 polls. Now, the Tripura voters said it all—bringing a smile to BJP karyakartas across the whole country.
Some of the West Bengal Trinamool leaders insulted the people of Tripura many a times, but the poll results gave a clear message about the political consciousness and sentiment of the people in this small state.
As the TMC concluded the civic polls in empty hands, mostly due to the failures of I-PAC in choosing leaders and a stop-gap committee before the elections in absence of powerful local leaders, they are likely to go for a new beginning in case of 2023 assembly polls. But then, one again the ‘Asmita’ or self-respect of the people of Tripura who witnessed and rejected the uppish Kolkatan leaders’ way of importing change in their own ways here in Tripura would still continue to haunt the IPac or for that matter their end customer –the TMC.
