Bi-elections for all total 132 seats in 58 Panchayats of 11 Blocks is going on peacefully in Tripura. Till now there has been no report of any major untoward incident though few small incidents took place in the northern part of the state between the BJP and IPFT.
Besides this polling is also taking place in seven seats of Panchayat Samiti in six blocks. Voters expressed that polling is going on peacefully and there is huge security arrangements.
Earlier, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has won unopposed 96 percent of the Gram Panchayat and Panchayat Samiti seats and all the 18 Zilla Parishad seats in Tripura, a State Election Commission (SEC) official said.
The by-elections to 3,386 seats — 3,207 Gram Panchayat seats, 161 Panchayat Samiti seats and 18 Zilla Parishads seats — are scheduled for September 30.
These seats fell vacant following large-scale resignations of elected representatives of Left parties after the BJP-IPFT came to power.
The opposition Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M)-led Left Front, the Congress and the IPFT, a tribal-based party, separately urged the State Election Committee to reschedule the ongoing election process as they claimed that “massive violence prevented their nominees to file papers”.
These parties alleged that the ruling BJP workers prevented their candidates from submitting nomination papers in 35 blocks.