India’s BJP names Manik Saha chief minister of Tripura

India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has appointed Dr Manik Saha as the chief minister of Tripura hours after the resignation of Biplab Kumar Deb from the post a year ahead of assembly polls in the state.

Deb announced Saha's name and said he would extend cooperation to the new chief minister after an emergency meeting of the BJP legislature, the NDTV reported on Saturday.

The Indian broadcaster reported dramatic scenes at the meeting where Minister Ram Prasad Paul protested the proposal, which led to a heated argument. Paul also broke a few chairs before the situation was calmed. A video of him screaming and banging a chair on the ground has surfaced.

Paul wanted deputy chief minister Jishnu Dev Varma, a member of the erstwhile Tripura royal family, as the next chief minister.

A dentist by profession and president of the BJP’s Tripura unit, Saha was elected as a Rajya Sabha MP in April.

"I was a common worker of the party and will continue to be to be so," Saha told reporters after being named the next chief minister.

Saha, a professor and head of the department of the Tripura Medical College and BR Ambedkar Memorial Teaching Hospital in Agartala, joined the BJP in 2016. He is also the president of the Tripura Cricket Association.

In 2021, Saha, a close associate of the outgoing Chief Minister Deb, became the president of the Tripura BJP Pradesh committee.

Deb took to Twitter to congratulate his successor and said Tripura will prosper under Prime Minister Narendra Modi's "vision and leadership”.

The sudden resignation came as a shock to many, especially during an election cycle, in which Tripura’s ruling BJP is likely to face a tough challenge from the All India Trinamool Congress, which defeated the BJP in the 2021 West Bengal polls.

Deb, the son of migrant parents from Bangladesh, became the first BJP chief minister of Tripura, ending the 25-year-rule of the Communist Party of India.

He, however, is not the first BJP CM to have resigned a year ahead of the elections. Last year, BJP’s chief ministers in Uttarakhand, Gujarat and Karnataka all resigned. The party retained a majority in the respective assemblies in this year’s polls.