Tripura: Voting to elect 60-member assembly today

Assembly elections are being held today across 60 assembly seats in the state in which 259 candidates are contesting.

Left Front and the Congress, the rivals have joined hands to remove the BJP from power while the BJP has given all its might to return to power.

The Congress-Left alliance, Tipra Motha and TMC have posed a challenge to the BJP and it’s ally IPFT.

BJP has fielded candidates on 55 seats, while IPFT is contesting on 5 seats.

Under the seat sharing agreement, the Left Front has fielded its candidates in 43 seats and the Congress is contesting in 13 seats, while supporting an independent on 1 seat.

Tipra Motha has fielded candidates on 42 seats.
TMC has also fielded its candidates.

Further, 58 candidates are independent and some of them are also supported by these parties and others as well.

The BJP won the 2018 assembly elections in Tripura by demolishing the Left’s 25-year rule.
In that election, BJP and IPFT contested together. BJP won 36 seats and IPFT won 8 seats among 60 seats.

The Left parties won just 16 seats while the Congress could not grab a single seat.
Notably, 20 seats in Tripura are reserved for Scheduled Tribes, while the remaining 40 seats are unreserved.

In the last election, the BJP-IPFT alliance won all 20 tribal reserve seats.
However, this time the political situation has changed since 2018.

In the year 2018, the Left got 43.35% of votes while the Congress got 1.7% of votes. when they contested separately. BJP is fighting the election with PM Narendra Modi’s name.

Tribal votes always played a major role in the assembly elections in the north-eastern state, which has about 65% Bengali-speaking people, 32% tribal community and 8% Muslim population.