Sunil Deodhar, the man who steered the BJP ship in Tripura, had before the counting day said sweeping the Left Front out would be nothing short of a revolution.
The Bengali word for revolution is biplab.
Unlike in the 2016 Assam polls, where the BJP’s slogan was Asomore ananda Sarbananda to promote Chief Minister Sarbananda Sonowal as the harbinger of happiness, the party had no jingle based on its Tripura unit chief Biplab Kumar Deb, chosen on Tuesday to head the first BJP government in the landlocked State.
Rather, the ousted CPI(M) had a campaign song that went Biplab aashbei..., meaning revolution will come.
“Biplab has indeed come, in person and in ideology to cover Tripura in saffron,” Mrinmoy Sinha, a BJP campaign manager, said.
Homecoming
It has indeed been a homecoming for Mr. Deb, who spent 15 years in New Delhi and elsewhere in northern India before being entrusted with heading the BJP in Tripura in January 2016.
He replaced Sudhindra Dasgupta, a veteran who was party president for five years.
Buoyed by the success of young leaders who helped the BJP win Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Manipur, the party had been looking for a fresh young face to do the job in Tripura.
What weighed in favour of Mr. Deb, 48, was his stint in the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
His mentor in the Sangh was K.N. Govindacharya and his trainer was Mr. Deodhar, now the party’s Prabhari for Tripura.
Mr. Deb, whose Delhi-based wife is a Deputy Manager in the State Bank of India’s Parliament House branch, thanked the people for voting for a change.
“The people have voted for a change and in the process have given us a huge responsibility to bail the State out of 25 years of Left Front misrule,” Mr. Deb said, recalling the “sacrifice” of 11 party members who were killed in the run-up to the elections.
