Biplab Kumar Deb: Fit and proper pracharak

Tripura's first BJP chief minister-designate owes his climb to prominence to several mentors in the RSS, in which he has served since the early nineties

Biplab Kumar Deb, a gym instructor, set to be the new Tripura chief minister, ran the headlines on television channels and news websites as the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) ended the 25-year rule of the Left Front in Tripura when the counting of votes took place on Saturday.

Since then, Deb, 48, has spent at least some minutes in most of his interviews to the media clarifying that he has never been a gym instructor.

His journalist friends in New Delhi — and he has several because he has worked closely over the past 15 years with some senior BJP leaders — have also attempted, mostly in vain, to disabuse their colleagues of the notion that Deb started his professional life as a gym instructor.

But the gym-instructor-to-chief-minister story, a near rags-to-riches trope, is probably too tempting a clickbait for the media to renounce. And Deb, with his height and build, could fit the stereotype. “During a television interview, I said I used to visit the gym to exercise, but now I can’t seem to find any time. I am surprised that the media construed it to mean — and reported —  that I was once a gym instructor,” he says.

Deb’s climb in the world of politics has been more prosaic. He grew up in Tripura, and graduated from Udaipur College. He arrived in Delhi in the late 1990s and has been a Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) volunteer ever since.

In his tweets, speeches and television interviews, Deb has been effusive in acknowledging the “support and guidance” of Sunil Deodhar, the RSS pracharak who ran the BJP’s election campaign in Tripura, in making his political success possible. “You stood by my side in every possible way,” he tweeted a couple of days back.

True, Deb, a father of two, was plucked out of relative anonymity by Deodhar, to replace the then party’s state unit chief Sudhindra Dasgupta in January 2016. But there have been several unsung RSS workers who have guided Deb’s political journey in the last two decades.

According to journalist Sanjay Mishra, who knows Deb well and as a journalist working for a leading Hindi daily has tracked his career closely, RSS’s Ramchandra Sahasrabhojani and Rakesh Goswami have also been the guiding lights in Deb’s career.

That Deb is steeped in the values of the RSS is important for the Sangh Parivar since he now heads a state that has been a stronghold of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), which the RSS considers its ideological enemy. Deb, party sources say, would need all his RSS training to dismantle the influence of the Left ideology in Tripura.

If Sahasrabhojani persuaded Deb to leave Tripura and settle in Delhi, Goswami had Deb work with him at Suruchi Prakashan, which publishes RSS literature. Deb then met Govindacharya and later RSS pracharak Ramesh Siledar.

According to Mishra, Deb’s climb to the chief ministerial chair started under Siledar’s mentoring, who asked him to revive his contacts with RSS pracharaks and affiliated organisations working in the northeast. Siledar also advised Deb to interact more often with RSS joint general secretary Krishna Gopal, who has spent years in the northeastern states expanding the RSS network.

Eventually, Gopal played the pivotal role in helping Deb, whose wife works in a public sector bank in Delhi, be identified as the party’s top leader in Tripura. As the party chief in Tripura, Deb’s claim to fame has been to poach Congress legislators, district leaders and workers to the BJP, which had little cadre to speak of in the state other than that of the RSS.

Ever since his name has been announced as the party’s chief ministerial candidate, Deb has been careful to make all the right moves. One of his first acts was to visit outgoing chief minister Manik Sarkar to take his blessings.

“My focus will be on good governance, health and education. Tripura for now will require some special attention. I will take advice from Manikda since he has governed the state and is experienced,” Deb tweeted, along with a photograph showing him touching Sarkar’s feet.

As the BJP faced criticism for initially legitimising the razing of statues of Vladimir Lenin, the BJP and RSS social media network spread this picture as proof of its “political culture” of respecting elders and those from other ideological streams.

The Tripura BJP then floated a suggestion that it would install a massive statue of the last king of Tripura, Maharaja Bir Bikram, who ruled from 1908 to 1947. In its election campaign and in its attempt to reach out to the tribal population of Tripura, the BJP had tried to appropriate the legacy of the former king.

Pradyot Deb Barman, Bir Bikram’s grandson, who is the working chief of the state Congress unit but had felt helpless during the election campaign with central leader P C Joshi running the show, nipped the suggestion in the bud.

“Kindly don’t drag my grandfather Bir Bikram into this statue controversy. Suggestions that the Maharaja’s statues will replace Lenin and Marx are disappointing. If anyone wants to honour his memory, then feel free to build a new one but not by razing a statue of another. I would rather see a scholarship for students in Bir Bikram’s name,” Deb Barman, clearly the putative rival of Deb in the years to come, tweeted.

Deb Barman also congratulated Deb as the new chief minister of Tripura. “I have been saying for a long time that the sentiment in Tripura is anti-Left. As an opposition we will be constructive…,” he tweeted.

With Deb Barman, who is revered by the state’s tribal population as the scion of the royal family, making his ambitions evident, and BJP ally, the Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura , already reviving its demand for a separate state for tribals, the new chief minister faces significant challenges.