NE gets new leaders, new governments
TRIPURA CHIEF MINISTER Biplab Deb will be sworn in on March 9 in Agartala, with tribal leader Jishnu Debbarma named as his deputy
AGARTALA: Biplab Deb, a young BJP leader with a background in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), will be Tripura’s 10th chief minister.
Tribal leader Jishnu Debbarma has been named as his deputy, Union minister Nitin Gadkari announced on Tuesday.
The names were announced after Gadkari and his colleague Jual Oram, who arrived in the state on Tuesday, held a meeting with the winning candidates at the state guest house.
Deb, a Bengali, and Debbarma, who belongs to the royal family, have been named for the top jobs as a balancing formula to steer the BJP’s future political strategy in the northeastern state.
Deb won the Tripura assembly elections for the first time from Banamalipur constituency with a margin of 9,549 votes. Born in a small village of Gomati District, Deb left the state for Delhi when he was 24 years old.
The 48-year-old returned to the state as in-charge of Mahajan Sampark Abhiyan before being chosen for the post of BJP president. The saffron party started making inroads into the Marxist bastion after he took charge.
Varma has been fielded from Charilam seat, where polls would be conducted on March 12.
The new government will be sworn in on Thursday in Tripura, where the BJP-led alliance defeated the Communist Party of India (Marxist) government in power in the northeastern state for 25 years, the saffron party’s general secretary Ram Madhav said on Monday.
The BJP and alliance partner, the Indigenous Peoples Front of Tripura (IPFT), scripted history last week by winning the Tripura assembly polls with a two-thirds majority in the state, ensuring India would now have 15 chief ministers from the party.
The BJP in 2013 had forfeited its deposit in 49 of the 50 seats it contested, bagging less than 2% of the vote. This time around, it swept to a comfortable majority winning 43 seats with an ally, ousting the long-serving Communist chief minister of the state, Manik Sarkar.
The BJP’s success came on the back of anti-incumbency against CPI(M), with a range of groups unhappy with Sarkar – government employees, young students, job aspirants, tribals.
The saffron party, led by general secretary Madhav and state in charge Sunil Deodhar, built a robust organisation, stitched alliances, imported leaders from other parties, occupied the entire opposition space vacated by Congress and snatched away even old Left loyalists.
The swearing-in of the new ministers would take place on March 9 in the Assam Rifles Maidan, said Deb. He said Prime Minister Narendra Modi, BJP president Amit Shah and chief ministers of all the BJP-ruled states would be invited.
Gadkari congratulated Deb for the landslide victory against the Left Front and said he hoped Tripura would move on the path of progress under his leadership.
“We hope poverty and starvation of people and the unemployment problem would come to an end in the new regime,” he said. Later, a combined meeting of BJP and IPFT was held during which the latter endorsed the decision of BJP legislature party.