CPM took 20 tribal seats for granted: Sunil V Deodhar

In the last few years, the BJP had made great strides in Tripura, a state where all our candidates, barring one, lost their deposits in the 2013 elections. For the party's success, we owe a lot to the people of Tripura, who decided to take charge and to the BJP workers who worked round the clock to get us to where we are today.

When I moved to Tripura in 2015, the state unit was very weak and the organisation was functioning on meagre resources. Most of our morchas were not functioning properly, and the tribal morcha was non-existent. The state was reeling under corruption, and yet, the people were apprehensive of hitting the streets for demonstrations.

The party's state president then was in his 70s and we realised that there were some limitations when we tried to reach out to the young electorate. The CPM had the general idea that all the 20 seats, set aside for the tribal votebank, were in their hands, and that, when the CPM prepares for any Assembly elections, it starts counting from the 21 seat. We decided that it is time we ensured that the CPM starts counting from one.

We took a decision to appoint several people across the state as 'panna pramukh'. The voter list in Tripura runs into 48,000 pages, and each pages contains over 60 names. We appointed 48,000 people as 'panna pramukh' whose job it was to ensure that these people voted for the BJP. We held a training camp for them, and told them to segregate voters into three categories — BJP supporters, CPM supporters and neutral voters. We told them that the neutral votes are crucial for us, and that they should be converted into BJP voters. We told them to try to persuade the CPM supporters, too. By the end of the exercise, we had the names of and booth data of over 35,000 polling booths. This was our first major step in micro-management.

The CPM is organisationally strong and they knew the voters in a way that we did not. So, we held Tripura festivals in all major metros — in Bangalore, Mumbai, Delhi, Kolkata and Silchar — so that we acquaint ourselves with the voters who stay outside the state. We wanted to ensure that the CPM does not cast fake votes in the name of any person who is outside the state on polling day, and we managed to maintain a data of over 1 lakh voters who were going to be absent on polling day. Our polling agents had a list of absent and dead voters, apart from those who had shifted voter IDs from Tripura to other states to ensure that no fake voting was allowed.

The party at the Centre treats elections in every region specifically. And when there is a gap to fulfill, teams from the Centre are brought in. We had social media, IT and communications experts from Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Guwahati. In one year, we built a war room of trained IT guys, social media experts, video editors, etc.

It was evident that in 1998, the people of Tripura were ready to dethrone the CPM, but they had no alternative. In all these years, the CPM ignored the tribal areas and only in Bengali areas, there was some amount of development.

The CPM had always fought with the Congress, a party that never tried to build a booth-level organisation. For the first time, the CPM has met with a tougher challenger, of a rival party which had the knowledge and experience of building a cadre. I agree it was not easy for us as well.

The BJP has largely been seen as an anti-minority party. Our rivals — the Communists and the Congress — have painted us as such. But, if we look at the results today, we have a large number of the Christian voters because of our alliance with the IPFT, and some of the Muslim voters in the state, too, have chosen us. That's simply because of the BJP's inclusive development. The BJP is with everyone and in the near future, the party's true character will emerge.