Tripura Elections: A Close Look At The Electoral Battlespace

The state legislature of Tripura has 60 seats: 20 are reserved for scheduled tribes (ST), 10 for scheduled castes (SC), and the balance 30 are general seats.

To recap, these are the results of the past two assembly elections:

The demographics of Tripura are interesting and deceptive.

As per the last census, SC distribution is fairly uniform across the state, including in the tribal areas. The tribals are more concentrated in the hill tracts, which is where they were pushed into by the influx of refugees following the 1971 war.

There is a higher concentration of Muslims in north Tripura, bordering Mizoram, with large pockets to the west along the Bangladesh border.

While the state may ostensibly be 83 per cent Hindu, we see that the actual clefts of identity shave that figure to a sliver. The scheduled tribes and castes combined account for a full half of the population, and the ‘minority’ vote is another 16 per cent (of which the Christian and tribal categories will overlap).

So, we see that two-thirds of Tripura’s electorate can be played and swayed by the secular parties using the identity card. This is how the Congress, initially, and then the Communists held on to power for so long. And it is precisely this repulsive barrier which the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) breached in 2018.

The biggest loser, by far, was the Congress. They contested 59 seats in 2018, won none, and lost their deposits in 58 seats. Almost the entire Congress vote shifted in bulk to the BJP.

Since that debacle, the Congress has managed to gain a solitary representative in the legislature — when Sudip Roy Burman, a former Congressman who joined the BJP in 2018 and won from Agartala, resigned in early 2022, then re-joined the Congress and won a byelection.

In addition, the Congress is now in firm alliance with the Communists. Seat-sharing talks are still on as this piece goes to the press, but it is doubtful whether the left would allocate more than a dozen seats to the Congress. The implication is that there will be no Congress resurgence in the coming assembly elections.

The left managed to hold on to the bulk of its vote share in 2018. It still lost 8 per cent, mainly to the BJP, and fell from 52.3 per cent in 2013 to 44.4 in 2018.

Their strongholds remain those demographic pockets along the Bangladesh border, and they continue to enjoy a solid presence in most of the rest of the state. The left will benefit marginally from its alliance with the Congress, especially in tight contests.

There’s also a third force in the fray this time — the Tipraha Indigenous Progressive Regional Alliance (TIPRA), led by Tripura royal Pradyot Bikram Manikya Deb Barma.

As on date, they have refused to ally with either the left or the BJP, and Deb Barma’s rhetoric has been largely directed at the BJP. Whether this is a negotiation ploy to take over the space vacated by a former BJP ally, the Indigenous People's Front of Tripura (IPFT), we do not yet know.

A key feature of elections in Tripura is that they have always been intensely bipolar. Three-way contests are a rarity, and independents hardly ever win. The ‘Others’ vote was just 3.5 per cent in 2013, and 4.7 per cent in 2018.

Thus, the entry of the TIPRA-INPT into the fray, as an ostensibly independent, third force in tribal areas, is a novel feature in Tripura politics which hampers forecasting.

That leaves the BJP, which will be contesting the assembly elections on its own. Below is the 2018 vote share map, in which the BJP contested 51 seats with 36 wins, and the IPFT won eight of the balance nine.

A tranche analysis shows that the BJP-IPFT alliance scored very heavily in 2018. They got over 50 per cent of the vote share in 33 of their 44 wins. And in 20 more seats, they got between 45 to 50 per cent of the popular vote.

In contrast, even if we add the 2018 Congress vote to that of the left (to simulate their 2023 alliance), we see that this combination got more than 50 per cent of the vote in only 15 seats. On paper, that is a solid advantage to the BJP.

However, the BJP has to contend with the departure of the IPFT, some dissatisfaction, a few defections, the rise of TIPRA, a possible splitting of the vote in tribal areas, and the impact of a left-Congress alliance.

The BJP appears to have countered some of these headwinds by engineering a few defections of their own.

Moboshar Ali, sitting Member of Legislative Assembly (MLA) from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) for Kailasahar constituency in north Tripura, joined the BJP on 27 January. This was a solid left win in 2018, and a rare three-way contest in which the Congress polled 20 per cent, and the BJP 33 per cent.

Flanking Ali was former Congressman Billal Mia, who won Boxanagar seat twice in the past. This seat has been a Communist redoubt since 2003, and in 2018, the left won it with 58 per cent of the vote share. Both these entries will have a positive impact for the BJP in SC-reserved seats (it won eight of 10 in 2018).

In a state where the identity card has been played to death for decades, the entry of two prominent Muslim politicians into the BJP fold will, to mangle metaphors, furiously set a consolidation cat among vote-banking pigeons.

Nonetheless, the BJP has its work cut out in Tripura. The situation will become slightly clearer only once the opposition seat-sharing agreements are finalised, the TIPRA and a local tribal ally, the INPT, decide how many seats they will contest on their own as a genuine third force, and the BJP releases its candidate list.

Also Read Part 1: Tripura Is Finally Getting Its Act Together, But Will The 'Double Engine' Continue?