Why did Congress relinquish Tripura for the Left?

New Delhi: The Congress appeared to have ceded its space to the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in Tripura as none of its big guns campaigned in Tripura where polling was held on Thursday.

The two parties struck an alliance for the first time in the northeastern state where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ended the 25-year-uninterrupted Left rule in 2018.

While the CPI(M) is contesting 47 seats, Congress is fighting in the remaining 13 constituencies.

On the other hand, the BJP is contesting 55 seats while its ally, the Indigenous Peoples Front of Tripura (IPFT), has fielded candidates in six constituencies. There will be a friendly fight in one seat.

The Trinamool Congress has fielded nominees in 28 constituencies and there are 58 independents in the fray too.

Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge and both Rahul Gandhi and his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra skipped the campaigning and so did its other key leaders. It was left to Adhir Chowdhury, Deepa Dasmunshi and party general secretary Ajay Kumar to go all guns blazing against the BJP that had deputed all its firepower to the state.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Union Home Minister Amit Shah, BJP president JP Nadda and a dozen central ministers campaigned for the party candidates. Assam chief minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, the BJP’s go-to-man in the Northeast, had canvassed extensively in the state.

For the CPI(M), general secretary Sitaram Yechury apart from senior leaders Prakash Karat, Brinda Karat and Mohammad Salim toured the state. Former Tripura chief minister Manik Sarkar and other senior leaders from the state too held the fort.

On a break after his hectic five-month-long nationwide Bharat Jodo Yatra, Rahul Gandhi travelled to his Lok Sabha constituency Wayanad in Kerala and was also seen skiing in the world famed ski resort Gulmarg (Kashmir).

Surprisingly, he decided to stay away from Tripura. So did his sister Priyanka Gandhi. Even the Congress president did not find time to campaign in the state.

It seemed as if the Congress's big guns were avoiding sharing the stage with the Left leaders. The Congress is in alliance with the CPI(M) in Tripura and the two were together in the 2021 assembly elections in West Bengal, but they have sworn enemies and are at each other’s throats in Kerala.

This dichotomy cost the grand old party, dear, in Kerala in the last assembly elections in 2021 when the CPI(M) trounced the Congress to retain power and create history in the southern state.

It was a rare achievement given that no incumbent government had come back to power in Kerala except in 1977. That year, Congress had teamed up with the Communist Party of India (CPI) to defeat the CPI(M) to retain power in the state. The CPI had also backed the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi on the declaration of Emergency in 1975, an issue that saw her and the Congress party's ouster in the 1977 general elections.

In the recent past, Rahul Gandhi had stayed away from the “heat and dust” of elections in Himachal Pradesh too. In the assembly elections held in November last year in the hill state, Congress ousted the BJP to regain power.

Unlike Kerala, Himachal Pradesh had maintained its decades-old tradition of throwing out the incumbent government.

Tripura done, it is over to Meghalaya and Nagaland now.