Communist Party workers huddled against the walls of the party office in Tripura’s sweltering heat, straightening up and holding off their conversation, while a stern-faced, tall, bespectacled man dressed in a crisp white dhoti-kurta, inside room entered
Commanding the awe of the cadres was none other than 74-year-old Manik Sarkar, who had come to embody the communist movement in the Northeast, running the sole CPI(M)-led government in a difficult and troubled region for 20 long years. Before the BJP wave ended his party’s rule in 2018.
He has been following a grueling schedule for the past several weeks, campaigning on foot and in jeeps across the hills and valleys of Tripura, a state described as a ‘finger of land wrapped around Bangladesh’ Has gone.
Despite his age, his party has not been able to afford the helicopters that his rivals take to enter the state. Nor could it allow the “old war-horse” to retire from campaigning, as one of his aides described him.
“I convinced my colleagues that new blood should be brought in… (because) I have been contesting elections since 1979 and have been chief minister for 20 years,” he added with a smile in the PTI video. (However) I am on the battlefield”.
For the average CPI(M) worker or supporter, the government remains the ‘star campaigner’ for the entire Left Front, even though CPI(M) big names – Sitaram Yechury, Brinda Karat and Mohd Salim – were fielded Is. State.
Shekhar Dutta, a political commentator on the Northeast and a former journalist, said, “Many common people and especially his party cadre look up to him for his integrity in personal and political life and his straightforward behaviour.”
Just five years ago, newspapers were busy writing an obituary for the CPI(M) in the region, describing the Manik government as the ‘last communist state’.
However, the gruesome campaign by the government and its accomplices to mobilize large numbers shows that the hammer and sickle are not yet dead on Lal Maidan.
Despite the defeat of the CPI(M) in the last assembly and national elections here, its vote bank remained more or less intact. In the 2018 assembly elections, in the face of the Modi wave, its vote share was reduced to six per cent, but the party still maintained a strong 42 per cent among the electorate.
A resurgent youth and student wing is propelling the party this time to try to reclaim many of the seats it lost, with leaders like Sarkar and his colleague Jitendra Chaudhary, the party’s tribal face, leading the campaign.
“Anti-incumbency worked against the CPI(M) in 2018. Deterioration in law and order, political violence and unfulfilled promises are working against the BJP this time,” Dutta said.
CPI (M) leaders seem to agree with this. During the interview, Sarkar said, “This time the real fight is the fight for restoration of democracy, civil liberties…as well as (creating) jobs, increasing income and purchasing power.”
The government earned a remarkable reputation for the state during its tenure, with the state’s literacy rate crossing 87 percent, in addition to better-than-average ratings on most health and social indicators.
However, endemic problems such as lack of industry and trade in the landlocked state, despite being just 70 km from Chittagong – a major port in Bangladesh, force most people to work for the state government (with a population of 4 million). to 1.8 lakh) at last count) or are migrating to the mainland in search of jobs and will likely continue until India Get a port to the northeast.
The veteran communist leader attempted to bolster Tripura and the Northeast’s need for an outlet to the sea to bolster the central government’s diplomacy towards Bangladesh, offering Tripura’s share of locally generated gas-based electricity to the power-hungry neighbor. Did.
However, to this day trade and transit with Bangladesh from the Northeast remains a problem affecting the region’s economy and job creation potential.
Born in a middle-class family, Sarkar joined the communist movement as a student activist while studying at Maharaja Bir Bikram College and soon became an office-bearer of the SFI and eventually became a state committee member of the CPI at the young age of 23. . (M).
After being elected as an MLA, he was made the chief whip of the party in 1980. At the age of 49, he was made a member of the Politburo of the party and also the Chief Minister of the state.
Much of Sarkar’s life was spent fighting the Congress party, and with the second phase of insurgency in the state, which he successfully controlled with a combination of carrot and stick measures against the insurgents, although improving the condition of tribals remains a work in progress at best.
The Congress and the CPI(M) have certainly joined hands to defeat the BJP in this election, an inconsistency that the government readily accepts. “It is true that we have fought against each other (CPI-M and Congress) on the basis of ideology… But the RSS-BJP and their fascist regime has forced us to come together,” he said.
If the alliance succeeds in turning the electoral tables against the BJP, the challenge will be for the two to work together as partners in government, possibly the first of its kind.
Then senior leaders like Sarkar can have a new role of political peacekeepers.
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(This story has not been edited by News18 staff and is published from a syndicated news agency feed)