Manik Saha to take oath as Tripura 11th Chief Minister today

New Delhi, May 15: Manik Saha will be the new Tripura chief minister succeeding Biplab Kumar Deb who resigned on Saturday, BJP leaders said. He will take oath as the eleventh chief minister of Tripura on Sunday at the Raj Bhawan in Agartala.

As per a report on news agency ANI, the swearing-in ceremony of the council of ministers will take place at 11:30 am. Biplab Kumar Deb on Saturday resigned as the chief minister of the Tripura, in a typical BJP style without much foofaraw. And within a few hours, the party's state legislative unit elected Manik Saha as its new leader.

In an apparent effort to ward off anti-incumbency and stem any disgruntlement within its ranks in Tripura, the BJP on Saturday adopted its now successfully tested strategy of going with a new face in the state assembly polls. The BJP has changed five chief ministers since 2019, including in Gujarat and Karnataka.

In September last year, the BJP had changed Vijay Rupani with Bhupender Patel, who hailed from numerically significant Patel community, as Gujarat chief minister. While changing the chief minister in Karnataka, the saffron party replaced Lingayat stalwart BS Yediyurappa as Karnataka CM with another Lingayat leader Basavaraj S Bommai.

In Uttarakhand, it replaced two Thakur chief ministers with another Thakur leader. Assam also saw the BJP replacing its chief minister of five years Sarbananda Sonowal with Himanta Biswa Sarma following the assembly elections last year.

However, this was considered more a case of the party rewarding Sarma than it taking any dim view of his predecessor, who was later made a Cabinet minister in the Modi government. PTI JTR KR JTR RT

Saha is also the fourth former Congress leader from the Northeast to become chief minister in the region after joining the BJP, a clear signal that a leader's electoral value is of paramount importance for the party.