Newsmaker: Meet Pratima Bhoumik, BJP's candidate from Dhanpur seat

The BJP is banking on Tripura's first Union minister and its very own 'Didi' to breach the 'red fort' that has been impregnable since 1972

The Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP’s) list of candidates for the Tripura Assembly elections threw up a few surprises. Notable among these being the exclusion of Biplab Kumar Deb, who was the party’s first chief minister (CM) in the state, and the inclusion of Pratima Bhoumik, junior minister, social justice and empowerment, in the Union Cabinet.

Bhoumik’s candidacy is of a piece with the BJP’s ‘gender empowerment’ policy, envisaging greater representation of women in every tier of the power hierarchy from the panchayat upwards.

Bhoumik, 52, is contesting from Dhanpur and keeps a punishing schedule. Her day begins at 6 am and ends at 3 am, leaving her three hours to catch a few winks.

“The leaders have asked her to campaign all over the state, so she has to juggle her day,” says an aide. She carries packets of jhalmuri, the spicy puffed rice snack that serves as a filler between lunch and dinner. She eats her meals at the homes of BJP workers.

Bhoumik uses a Jeep to travel into the interior, but when she reaches a village, she walks to people’s houses. Like other candidates, Bhoumik’s speeches focus largely on the Narendra Modi government’s welfare programmes, although she makes it a point to propagate the BJP’s purported emphasis on self-help groups that empower women financially.

Little known outside Tripura until she was inducted into Modi’s Cabinet with the distinction of being the state’s first permanent resident to make the cut, Bhoumik, a science graduate from Agartala’s Women’s College, is wedded to the BJP since 1991, when the party barely had a presence in the Northeast. In her sari and rubber sandals, she’s likened by Agartala’s political observers to West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee.

But Mamata is not her role model.

“It was perhaps (the late) Sushma Swaraj,” says an observer. When Swaraj passed away in 2019, Bhoumik reminisced about her interaction with the former foreign minister when she had visited Agartala in 2008 to protest the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance government’s “inability” to rein in prices.

Bhoumik then helmed the BJP’s women’s front and the buzz was Swaraj was so “impressed” with her performance at the protests that she recommended her as a candidate from Tripura West in the 2019 Lok Sabha election.

In her constituency, she speaks the eastern Bengali dialect, which is used in large parts of Bangladesh and Tripura. To reinforce her down-to-earth image, she cooks khichuri and serves it to people on plantain leaves at public functions.

“No other BJP leader has her organisational skills and ability to connect with the masses,” says veteran Tripura journalist Mohit Paul.

The BJP’s victory in 2018 was largely attributed to the near en masse defection of Congress leaders and members and the consequent shift in the Congress votes, and not its core support base.

Despite the BJP being on Tripura’s periphery for years, Bhoumik remained a “dedicated soldier” like Jishnu Dev Varma, the present deputy CM.

She twice contested against former CM Manik Sarkar of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), in the Assembly polls and lost. In 2018, she refused to take her imminent defeat as something fated, mobilised her supporters and corralled the counting centre, but the CPI(M) cadre was no less aggressive. Finally, she made her electoral debut in 2019, winning over the CPI(M)’s sitting Member of Parliament Sankar Prasad Datta.

Her entry into the Union Cabinet in July 2021 was especially celebrated by the BJP because although Santosh Mohan Deb and Triguna Sen represented Tripura at the Centre earlier, neither belonged to the state. Deb was from Assam and Sen from West Bengal. Apart from the gender quotient, the other factors in Bhoumik’s favour are that she’s from the backward caste of Nat or Natta and a rural family of Dhanpur in the Sepahijala district.

Indeed on her first visit to Tripura on becoming a minister, she stated she would “act as a bridge between Modi and the people of the state”. “Her ministerial position ignited the cadre more than any other factor,” notes a political observer.

BJP sources maintained Bhoumik’s “rise” was facilitated by the Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma who micromanages the Northeast. This time Pratima di, as she is popularly known, is up against Kaushik Chanda, a 42-year-old CPI(M) worker in Dhanpur. The constituency was held for five decades by the Left, but Bhoumik’s candidacy might have made the fight interesting and less one-sided.