Agartala, Feb. 25: For all its reputation as a rebel-infested state, Tripura has been free from the Bihar variety of caste-based political violence.

Yet Marxist poet-politician Anil Sarkar has been accused of making a conscious attempt to introduce such a trend in Tripura — albeit in his own way. He named his dog “Brahmin” and even spurned prasad (consecrated food) offered to him as education minister by students during Saraswati Puja.

Now seeking a fresh term in the seat of power from the Pratapgarh Assembly constituency, Anthony Firangi — the pseudonym under which Sarkar pens ballads and rhymes — looks a harried man.

The first discordant note was struck by some Brahmin voters in the Thakurpara hamlet, when the controversial education minister was on a door-to-door campaign there on February 6. “You have been saying all kinds of things against the Brahmins, now why do you come for votes?” asked Benoy Chakraborty, a schoolteacher and a priest.

A constituency reserved for Scheduled Castes near Agartala, Pratapgarh has only about 20 per cent “upper caste” voters among the 56,109-strong electorate.

“The point is, the so-called upper castes, mostly government employees and rich businessmen, can influence voters down the social ladder,” said Bhajan Lal Das, a senior CPM leader and close ally of Anil Sarkar. And this is what worries the CPM, as the Scheduled Castes are drifting away from the party.

In Ananda Nagar, Jogendra Nagar, Jarul Bachai, Purba Aralia and other villages, the Congress candidate, Narayan Das, has found good support from the electorate.

“For all of Sarkar’s rhetoric, the poor people of Pratapgarh have got practically nothing from the CPM over the past decade and naturally they welcome us this time,” said Ranjit Das, a PCC member.

Sarkar worked his way up the CPM ladder the hard way, narrowly escaping disciplinary action in 1994 for “taking to bourgeois ways”, according to a top CPM leader.

The education minister was photographed in all prominent national dailies taking a snap of Tamil Nadu chief minister Jayalalithaa at a meeting in Delhi — construed as a “cardinal sin” in the CPM’s spartan code of conduct. “Had Nripen Chakraborty not been expelled from the party in 1995, Anilda would have found himself thrown out,” the CPM leader said.

A “sensitive man” and a “Dalit poet”, Sarkar could not bear the shock of hundreds of stalls, including some from Tripura, at the Calcutta Book Fair in 1998, go up in flames. He suffered a heart attack. The bypass surgery he underwent had a telling effect on his political mobility.

“The most bizarre spectacle was the veteran Marxist leader lecturing friends and acquaintances on the virtue of the products of a multinational company of which his son is the sole agent,” Prabodh Sarkar, a publisher, said.

The writing on the wall is clear: the battle for Pratapgarh will be a tough one but Sarkar’s die-hard followers are convinced that the “Dalits of Pratapgarh will not deny Anilda his last victory”.

“He has never lost an election since 1972 and won five times with convincing margin from Pratapgarh, so we do not visualise him losing,” Samar Chakraborty, a local CPM committee secretary, said.

On the question of this being Sarkar’s last election, Chakraborty minced no words: “After the bypass surgery, he is physically down and he knows it”.

Strange as it may sound, Anil Sarkar is touring many constituencies and addressing meetings to swing Scheduled Caste voters in the CPM’s favour.

“He knows his people will not let him down ultimately as the entire Scheduled Caste community of Tripura awaits the outcome of the polls in Pratapgarh,” Chakraborty added.