Outlook English - Print Subscribers Copy Outlook English, 26 February 2018 | Page 22

SA F FRON S URGE
a part of the ‘Hindu rashtra’.
Last time, the BJP had contested 50 of
the 60 seats, polling 33,808 votes overall
and winning nowhere. Its candidates lost
deposit in all but two, while the CPI(M)
won 49 seats, CPI one and the Congress
10. Then, in the run-up to the 2014 Lok
Sabha elections, PM candidate Narendra
Modi had his only flop show in Agartala:
the BJP rally was dotted with hardly
7,000 people. The 1972-formed Tripura,
like other states in tribal Northeast, had
never really been important for the saff­
ron party. Despite a substantive RSS
presence in the rugged region, the BJP
seldom thought of using the cadres as a
force multiplier. That was then.
N
OW, as tiny Tripura gears up to vote,
the BJP has emerged as a serious
challenger to the CPI(M) that has
been running governments in the
state for a quarter century—the last two
decades of it with Manik Sarkar as the
chief minister. Despite the high anti-­
incumbency disenchantment with his
government, the 69-year-old’s austere
personal image remains largely undam-
aged. The Congress as the main Oppo­
sition has been nearly wiped out. Seven
of that party’s 10 MLAs have switched to
the BJP after a brief sojourn in Trinamool
Congress (TMC). Another has joined the
CPI(M), leaving the grand old party with
only just two legislators. The TMC too
has a negligible presence in the state.
Some flags and banners of its supremo
Mamata Banerjee appeared near the
airport just before a few senior party
leaders landed from Calcutta for some
perfunctory campaigning.
From zero presence to being the only
adversary of the deep-rooted Left has not
been an easy task for the BJP. It had to
build up its cadre brick by brick. Currently
engaged at the ground level are an estima­
ted 50,000 workers of the BJP, RSS and
other affiliates like the Vishwa Hindu
Parishad, Bajrang Dal, Bharatiya Mazdoor
Sangh and the Vanvasi Kalyan Ashram.
Nearly 5,000 workers have been brought
from Assam and other neighbouring
states. Plus, trainers like Deshkar who are
senior RSS functionaries. The aim is to
reach the last voter to take on the CPI(M)
at its own game of man-to-man marking.
Setting up a direct fight with the CPI(M)
has taken the BJP more than three years
of hard work. It not just relied on the
exis­ting RSS base; the party also drew on
22 OUTLOOK 26 February 2018
RIDE UP Entry gate of the RSS state
headquarters, 15 km off Agartala
the pracharaks with vast experience of
working in the region. One of the first
things Amit Shah did after taking over as
party president in November 2014 was to
depute Sunil Deodhar, a former RSS pra-
charak with experience in the Northeast,
in charge of Tripura as its prabhari.
Deodhar, 52 and staying put in Tripura
for past two years, went about the mam-
moth task of building the organisation in
the state from scratch. He got his former
RSS apprentices Biplab Kumar Deb and
Tinku Roy as BJP state president and
state youth chief respectively. Young and
flashy Deb is now the “unofficial” CM
face of the BJP. Under them, Deodhar
started making various morchas: women
morcha, yuva morcha, SC and ST besides
for min­orities and farmers. They worked
BJP state head Sunil
Deodhar (in pic) has
formed several morchas
that work from the top
to reach the grassroots.
from the top to reach the grassroot level.
After the various morchas came the 60
vistaraks—the younger Sangh function-
aries given the party’s charge in each
asse­
mbly—and the panna pramukhs
(literally the page in-charges) responsi-
ble for the 60-odd voters on the one page
of voters’ list allotted to each.
“When we started out, the presence of
Sangh in Tripura was negligible com-
pared to other North-eastern states like
Meghalaya, Assam and Manipur,” Deo­
dhar tells Outlook. “Maybe the focus was
more on other states since they had sub-
stantial minority population. In Tripura,
Hindus form majority. Somehow, the
Sangh couldn’t establish roots here but it
has grown fast in last two years.”
On it part, the CPI(M) adm­its that
some of the party leaders and workers
have been involved in corruption. “We
take prompt action against them. It is
the RSS and the BJP that have been
using money power to woo voters and
influence them with rhetoric,” the par-
ty’s state secretary Bijan Dhar tells
Outlook. Acco­rding to ano­ther CPI(M)
leader, the BJP is taking adv­antage of the
sense of being wronged that the tribals
have been playing on the sentiment to
create deeper fissures bet­ween them and
the Bengalis who comprise 68 per cent of
Tripura’s 45 lakh population.
It is more than apparent that the
CPI(M) is shaken by the exponential
growth of the BJP in such a short time. In
his rallies, CM Sarkar takes pains to tell
the electorate that they should not vote
for the “divisive” BJP that can “destroy
the moral fabric of the state”. The BJP’s