Elections to the 60-seat Tripura Assembly will take place on February 16.
Tripura will vote for a new government in the first Assembly election of this year on February 16. A Bharatiya Janata Party-led alliance ended the 25-year rule of the Left Front government in the state in 2018 and now eyes another successive term. Manik Saha, BJP leader and incumbent Chief Minister of the state, is one of the important faces in this year's assembly election. He has been tasked with bringing his party back to power.
Elections to the 60-seat Tripura Assembly will take place on February 16. The counting of votes will take place on March 2.
Here are 5 points on Manik Saha:
- Manik Saha was sworn in as the Chief Minister of Tripura in May last year, a few months ahead of the Assembly elections after Biplab Kumar Deb abruptly stepped down from the post. Mr Saha had left Congress to join BJP in 2016. He was made the party's state president in 2020.
- The 70-year-old is an oral and maxillofacial surgeon, who graduated from the King George Medical College, Lucknow. He is also a member of the Dental Council of India. In fact, while in office Chief Minister Saha performed surgery on a 10-year-old boy at his old workplace – the Tripura Medical College.
- Last year, Manik Saha, who has a political career spanning over three decades, contested his first-ever election. He won from the Town Bardowali Assembly constituency in the 2022 Tripura by-polls and defeated Asish Kumar Saha of Congress by a margin of 6,104 votes.
- Manik Saha won the only Rajya Sabha seat in Tripura last year. He resigned as a member of the Upper House after winning the by-election. The BJP has fielded him from the Town Bardowali constituency for the 2023 Tripura Assembly polls.
- The Chief Minister is a former badminton player and has also served as the president of the Tripura Cricket Association.