With five months to go for Tripura Assembly elections, senior Congress leader Sudip Roy Barman has said his party will ally with everyone needed to ensure the ruling BJP’s defeat.
“An alliance will be forged at any cost. Whatever is needed to defeat the BJP will be done. We will do everything needed to free people from this misrule,” Barman told reporters at Sabroom in South Tripura district on Monday.
Barman’s comments come in close succession to his appeal to the Opposition CPM, the TIPRA Motha and other non-BJP political parties to join hands and think through a strategy to defeat the saffron party, which they have accused of unleashing violence on opponents.
While no party has officially responded to his appeal, the CPM recently urged the Congress and other parties to defeat the saffron party in this month’s Rajya Sabha polls.
The BJP, meanwhile, has expressed confidence that the “dreams” of fighting the party together would not materialise since people were with it.
“The CPM has perpetrated hundreds of attacks on Congress supporters during elections before 2018 (after which the BJP came to power). Now that their leaders are trying to shake hands with the communists, their supporters will understand well what actually happened in those days. They will decide what to do,” BJP spokesperson Nabendu Bhattacharya said.
A six-term MLA, Barman quit the Congress in 2016 and joined the Trinamool Congress along with five other legislators, saying the Congress high command was not serious about removing the Left Front from power in the northeastern state.
Barman switched over to the BJP in 2017 and was elected from his home turf of Agartala in the 2018 Assembly polls. He was made health minister in the Biplab Deb cabinet but was dropped a year later, apparently over his differences with the chief minister.
A staunch critic of Deb, Barman went back to the Congress fold this year and said he would ensure the BJP’s defeat in the 2023 elections.