Agartala, March 28 (IANS): Former Tripura Chief Minister and the BJP candidate for the Tripura West Lok Sabha seat, Biplab Kumar Deb, claimed on Friday that veteran CPI-M leader Manik Sarkar is not willing to vote for Congress candidate Ashish Kumar Saha, who is also contesting from the same seat as a consensus nominee of the INDIA bloc.

Addressing an election rally in South Tripura, Deb said: “Manik Da is a veteran Communist leader who during his decades-long political career never voted for any non-Left party candidate. Therefore, this time too he is not willing to cast his vote for the Congress nominee.”

Manik Sarkar served as the Chief Minister of Tripura for 20 year, from 1998 to 2018.

Urging Sarkar to cast his vote for him, Biplab Deb said that being a CPI-M politburo member for many years, how can he cast his vote for the Congress candidate?

Biplab Deb also claimed that as a “genuine Communist”, Sarkar was not in favour of CPI-M’s alliance with the Congress, as he urged the veteran leader to vote for the BJP in the coming Lok Sabha elections.

Biplab Deb, currently a BJP Rajya Sabha member from Tripura, also said that all the senior Congress and Communist leaders participated in a rally when Ashish Kumar Saha filed his nomination papers on Wednesday, but Manik Sarkar was not seen there.

“This is because he is not in favour of this unholy alliance,” he said.

Meanwhile, CPI-M state Secretary Jitendra Chaudhury said that the Left Front, as part of the INDIA bloc, has decided to fight the polls together with its ally partners, including the Congress, to defeat the BJP.

Former CPI-M MLA Rajendra Reang is the Left nominee and INDIA bloc’s combined candidate for the Tripura East Lok Sabha seat, which is reserved for tribals, while Ashish Kumar Saha, who's also the Tripura Congress President, has been fielded from the Tripura West seat.

The two Parliamentary seats in the state - Tripura West and Tripura East - will go to the polls on April 19 and April 26, respectively.