The state of Tripura has been witnessing serious tension between party workers of BJP and CPM. The BJP workers have been accused of damaging a number of CPM offices, looting and even setting homes and shops of their CPM counterpart on fire.
They have also been accused of bulldozing two statues of Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, a video of which has gone viral on various social media sites. Tathagata Roy, the governor of Tripura and former BJP chief of West Bengal, hailed this act by tweeting a photo of the incident. The secretary in-charge of the BJP northeast unit, Ram Madhav, has also tweeted a photo of the incident praising the act, however, his tweet was later deleted.
The clashes between the two parties erupted after the BJP-led alliance uprooted the Manik Sarkar led CPM government. The alliance completely swept the Tripura assembly elections winning 43 of the 59 seats. The Communist Party of India (Marxist) had been in power in the state of Tripura for over 25 years before losing it, owing to an anti-incumbency amongst the people of Tripura and BJP’s proven marketing strategy.
The Bharatiya Janata Party has managed to extend its dominance in the north eastern states after the BJP-led alliance managed to win the assembly elections in Tripura as well as Nagaland.
Meghalaya, another state where election results were declared on 3rd March along with Tripura and Nagaland, saw a tight contest between Congress and NPP (National People’s Party) with Congress winning 21 seats, two more than NPP. The BJP which won just 2 seats, however, managed to build an alliance between all the other regional parties which meant Congress could not retain its power in Meghalaya even after winning the most number of seats.
A statue of EV Ramasamy, also known as Periyar, was also vandalised in Vellore yesterday. Periyar was a politician as well as a social activist who is popular for initiating the Self-Respect Movement. The incident took place just hours after a facebook post from H Raja, a BJP leader from Tamil Nadu, warning about the same. The post was later deleted after meeting a lot of backlash on the social media. A similar incident has come in light from Kolkata as the statue of Syama Prasad Mookerjee, a BJP icon, was also damaged this morning.
