Former Chief Minister Mukul Sangma (2010-2018), one of the key leaders of the Trinamool Congress in Meghalaya, contested from two assembly seats — Songsak and Tikrikilla – both in the Garo hills.
Sangma, opposition leader in the outgoing assembly, won the Songsak seat by a thin margin of 372 votes defeating ruling National People’s Party (NPP) candidate Nihim D Shira but lost the Tikrikilla seat to NPP’s Jimmy D. Sangma by a margin of 5313 votes.
The Trinamool Congress candidate for Meghalaya’s Rajabala seat, Mizanur Rahman Kazi, won the seat by a narrow margin of just 10 votes against NPP nominee Abdus Saleh.
In all the 28 seats the Trinamool Congress contested in Tripura, the party secured fourth or fifth position and the deposit of most party nominees was forfeited.
Election analysts said that the Trinamool Congress spoiled the non-BJP vote share and it could not even mark its presence in the BJP ruled state.
Trinamool Congress candidate Pujan Biswas, son of the party’s Tripura state president and senior lawyer Pijush Kanti Biswas, secured the highest number of 2029 votes in the Ramnagar assembly constituency. In the other constituencies the party managed a paltry number of votes.
In the high profile Ramnagar constituency, BJP candidate and former minister Surajit Datta won the seat for a record eight times by securing 46.2 per cent of the votes defeating the CPI-M supported independent candidate and senior lawyer Purushuttam Roy Barman, who got 43.83 per cent votes while Pujan Biswas managed only 5.5 per cent votes.
Like the BJP, the Trinamool Congress supremo and West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee set up party organisations in Assam, Tripura and Meghalaya headed by former Congress leaders.
Former Assam Congress president and former Rajya Sabha member Ripun Bora was made the TMC’s Assam unit chief while former Tripura Congress president Pijush Kanti Biswas was appointed the Tripura unit president. Former Congress Chief Minister Mukul Sangma (2010-2018) led the party unit in Meghalaya.
Mamata Banerjee accompanied by the party’s national general secretary Abhishek Banerjee visited both Meghalaya and Tripura for campaigning and announced that most of the schemes introduced in West Bengal by the TMC government would be launched in the two northeastern states if the party comes to power in these states.
To woo the electorate, the TMC promised to roll out the Meghalaya Financial Inclusion for Women Empowerment (MFI WE) scheme that would provide an assured monthly income support of Rs 1,000 per woman per household in the state, if the party was voted to power.
The MFI WE, also called ‘WE Card’, was announced by TMC supremo Mamata Banerjee in Shillong in December last year, sparking a controversy in the state.
After the TMC was founded in 1997-1998, it had set up bases in Tripura, Manipur and Assam but they could not maintain the political tempo in these states.
There were seven MLAs of other parties that once joined the TMC in Manipur but eventually, they quit one by one.
Former Tripura Chief Minister late Sudhir Majumder, incumbent Tripura Assembly Speaker and former Congress leader Ratan Chakraborty, Ashish Saha, Subal Bhowmik and others went to the TMC in 1998 but most of them returned to the Congress in 2001-2002.
Majumder contested from the West Lok Sabha constituency in 1999 on a TMC ticket and secured second position.
Congress MLA and the party’s former state president in Tripura Sudip Roy Barman, six other MLAs and many leaders quit the Congress in 2016 and joined the TMC and next year (2017) they joined the BJP.
Roy Barman, also a former minister, quit the BJP early last year and was re-elected to the Assembly in last year’s June by-election and February 16 general elections as a Congress nominee.
After the TMC started its organisational work in the third phase in Tripura in early 2021, it had been searching for a candidate for the party president’s post in the state and finally appointed Subal Bhowmik, a former Congress MLA and BJP leader, in April 2022.
But due to internal feuds, the TMC removed Bhowmik from the post on August 24, 2022, and appointed former Tripura Congress president Pijush Kanti Biswas as president of the party’s Tripura unit on December 11 last year.
–IANS
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