‘The responsibility for this is going to be handed over to Mukul Roy’.
New Delhi: With the electoral victory of the Trinamool Congress (TMC) for the third time in West Bengal, the party is planning to expand its footprints across different states, keeping in mind the 2024 general elections.
According to highly-placed sources within the TMC, the party is planning to expand in the North-east states like Tripura, Manipur and Assam in the coming months, after which the party will venture in states like Delhi, Bihar and Jharkhand.
This comes after the elevation of Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee’s nephew Abhishek Banerjee as the TMC’s national secretary, officially making him the number two within the party. Soon after his elevation, Abhishek Banerjee had said that the TMC would go nationally to project itself as the most formidable Opposition to take on the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections of 2024.
Sources in the TMC have confirmed to The Sunday Guardian that at the outset, the party is going to launch and revamp its state units in the three North-East states of Tripura, Manipur and Assam in the coming months. The responsibility for this is going to be handed over to Mukul Roy who once again jumped ship and changed his party from the BJP to the TMC.
Mukul Roy was one of the founding members of the TMC, but had fallen out with party chief Mamata Banerjee during the 2016 Assembly elections of Bengal and had jumped to the BJP in 2017, but following the BJP’s electoral loss in Bengal, Roy once again shifted his loyalty to his erstwhile party, the TMC.
“The TMC will first focus on Tripura to strengthen its organisational capabilities in the state. Tripura has huge potential for the TMC, since it has a huge number of Bengali population and almost every family in Tripura has some connection with Bengal. It would be easier for the party to make inroads in Tripura. Moreover, this state also has a vacuum as far as the Opposition space is concerned. For Manipur, the TMC had some space in that state which was ceded later to the BJP; the party will once again go to Manipur and start off fresh. In Assam too, we will look to build our organisation targeting the Bengali speaking population,” a senior TMC leader told this correspondent.
Manipur elections are slated to happen next year, while Tripura will go to polls in the beginning of 2023. In Manipur, the TMC had won about two MLAs in the 2017 Assembly elections and had secured about 2% of the total votes, while in Tripura, TMC did contest the 2018 Assembly elections, but managed to get just about 0.4% of votes, without winning a single seat.
But the leadership of the TMC is confident that with the five years of the BJP-ruled government coming to an end in 2023, the BJP would have significant anti-incumbency in the state and with the Opposition space, which was earlier occupied by the CPM, ceasing to exist, the TMC would be able to capture a large number of Bengali votes. The party has already released a song for its Tripura unit in Bengali where the contents of the song highlight how the TMC has initiated and implemented welfare projects like “Swastha Sathi’ for healthcare, “Sabuj Sathi” for the girl child, “Khaddha Sathi” for ration and food for all, among many other schemes.
“Our senior leadership, including Abhishek Banerjee, will visit Tripura soon. A strong state unit of the party will be formed in Tripura and it will start preparing for the elections from here on. The party has two goals, one being to be able to form a government in Tripura by throwing out the BJP government from the state as the people of Tripura are fed up with the BJP government, and the other is the Lok Sabha elections,” the TMC leader quoted above said.
However, for Assam, the party would take a call in the near future since elections in the state are now five years away, but the TMC leadership says that their target for Assam would be the 2024 polls as well.