Manik Sarkar, Badal Chowdhury will not contest Tripura Assembly poll

Left Front releases list of candidates and allots 13 seats to the Congress, its coalition partner for the first time in the State elections

Manik Sarkar, Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) Polit Bureau member and Chief Minister for 20 years, will not contest in the Tripura Assembly elections due on February 16. The party also dropped veteran leader and former Minister Badal Choudhury owing to health considerations.

Senior leaders of the State’s Left Front constituents as well as the CPI(M) released a list of 47 candidates here on Wednesday evening. The Left Front has allotted 13 seats to the Congress, which for the first time will be its coalition partner in the Assembly election.

The Congress is expected to announce its list of candidates tomorrow. Differences had earlier cropped up between the CPI(M) and the Congress over seat sharing arithmetic, forcing the cancellation of a scheduled press conference here on Tuesday.

CPI(M) State secretary Jitendra Chowdhury will contest from Sabroom constituency in south Tripura, an unreserved general seat.

Left Front leaders addressed a press conference and said a total of eight legislators who won in the 2018 Assembly election had not been nominated. They are Manik Sarkar, Badal Chowdhury, Bhanu Lal Saha, Tapan Chakraborty, Narayan Chowdhury, Jashbir Tripura and Mabasar Ali.

The CPI(M) negotiated for Mr. Ali’s constituency, Kailashahar in north Tripura, with the Congress. Pradesh Congress Committee president Birajit Sinha, who lost to Mr. Ali in 2018, is the likely candidate of the opposition alliance this time.

Of the 47 seats of the Left Front, the CPI(M) will put up candidates in 43, the Revolutionary Socialist Party (RSP) in one, the Communist Party of India (CPI) in one, the Forward Bloc in one, and there will be one Independent candidate — lawyer and human rights activist Pururshottam Roy Barman, who has been nominated in the prestigious Ramnagar constituency of the State capital.