People's Democracy

TRIPURA

Masses Spontaneously Celebrate Victory

SINCE the announcements of the success of Left Front candidates came on March 1 from the counting centres of the subdivisions in Tripura, culminating into a two-thirds majority for Left Front in the 60-seat state assembly, the people have been taking to the streets statewide to celebrate the victory spontaneously but soberly. Fireworks have lit up the air and the streets have been reverberating with loud slogans. The jubilant activists of the Left Front have taken out victory processions at several places.  Messages have poured in from several parts of the country, heartily hailing the mandate given by the militant masses of Tripura.

Speaking to newsmen on March 1 following the decisive verdict for the formation of a fifth Left Front government in Tripura, chief minister Manik Sarkar reaffirmed the Left Front government’s topmost agenda of pressing ahead for peace and prosperity in the state. He termed the result as the victory of the politically conscious, peace loving and patriotic people of Tripura over the profound political plotting of internal and international vested interests to ransack Tripura by devastating democracy and development. He also appreciated the all-out alertness shown by the administration in dealing with the extremist threat. Manik Sarkar said such massive reposition of the people’s trust obliges the Left Front to go on working towards peace and progress for the people.

Asked by newsmen on March 2 to express his reaction to the Left Front victory, the state Left Front convenor Baidyanath Majumder dubbed the victory as the combined outcome of the people’s positive response to the Left Front’s performance on the one hand and their rage against and repugnance towards Congress-extremist combine’s the barbaric blueprint to shatter the hopes and aspirations the people of this backward, landlocked state on the other.  The defeat of the Left Front in five extremist-infested constituencies of the state, is just a case in point, bringing to the fore how the ferocious fissiparous forces are ominously threatening the democratic set-up in the state.

At a press conference on the same day, the CPI(M)’s spokesman and state secretariat member Gautam Das said the Left Front victory has been achieved due to a ceaseless struggle by the people of Tripura, wading dauntlessly through the blood of 540 activists and supporters of the Left Front martyred over the last five years statewide. Forged in the fire of such a strenuous struggle, the people of Tripura, especially in the mixed-population areas, have been able to withstand the campaign of terror and slander unleashed during the run-up to the February 26 assembly polls by the heinous alliance of the Congress party with the INPT that is the political appendage of the NLFT, an outlawed extremist organisation.

Heartily hailing the state electorate for re-electing the Left Front, the state Left Front committee dubbed this victory as a referendum in favour of the continuation of democracy and development in Tripura.

Setting a glorious milestone in the history of mass movement in Tripura, as also in the ongoing globalisation of anti-imperialist resistance, the people of Tripura who once shattered the shackles of feudalism and then overthrewthe oppressive Congress regime, once again put up a revolutionary resistance against an ominous attempt of the country’s main opposition party, the 118 years old Indian National Congress, to hijack the ballot with the bullets of imperialist-sponsored anti-national and outlawed extremists. The death-defying resistance of the peace-loving and democratic minded people of Tripura to such a blatant bid to wrest power through extremist ferocity and unprincipled fraudulence, points to the vast potentiality of militant mobilisation of the masses by pro-people Leftist forces, giving the vision of a third alternative in the country a shot in the arms. (INN)