On Monday, eleven members of the Tripura Legislative Assembly took oath, joining the newly-appointed Chief Minister Manik Saha’s cabinet. CM Saha was sworn into office on May 15, by Governor SN Arya, after predecessor Biplab Kumar Deb resigned from his post on Saturday. Deb had become the first Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) CM in the state, in 2018. His resignation comes less than a year before the state assembly election in Tripura, which is scheduled for March 2023.
On May 14, Saha was elected as the new leader of the state legislature party, hours after Biplab Deb announced his resignation. After taking office, Saha indicated that he will continue the former CM’s schemes and decisions. “I share a very strong chemistry with the former chief minister,” he said at a press conference.
In a letter to the governor, the new CM stated, “Jishnu Dev Varma, NC Debbarma (IPFT), Ratan Lal Nath, Pranajit Singha Roy, Manoj Kanti Deb, Santana Chakma, Ram Prasad Paul, Bhagaban Das, Sushanta Chowdhury, Rampada Jamatia and Prem Kumar Reang (IPFT) will take oath as the cabinet ministers of the state tomorrow.”
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While nine ministers are being retained from the previous Deb administration, Rampada Jamatia and Prem Kumar Reang have been freshly inducted as part of the council of ministers. While Jamatia is a BJP leader, Reang is from the Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura (IPFT). The swearing-in ceremony started at 12 noon today, at the Raj Bhavan in Agartala, where Governor Arya administered the oath of office and secrecy to the new cabinet. The ceremony was conducted in the presence of CM Saha, former chief minister Biplab Deb, among other dignitaries.
CM Saha also said that the BJP has started preparing for the upcoming state assembly election. “We have already started working for assembly elections in 2023. The upcoming election is not a challenge for us, it may be for the other party. The work that PM Modi and Biplab Dev have done for the state will be continued,” he said. Notably, in 2020, Saha was made the chief of the party’s state unit, and this year, he became Tripura’s first Rajya Sabha MP from the BJP.
