West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee offered prayers at the Kamakhya temple here on a day the Trinamul Congress swept the Calcutta Municipal Corporation polls.
Mamata left Calcutta soon after Bengal’s ruling party established leads in most of the wards. The result was celebrated by Trinamul’s Tripura unit which feels the impressive win will bolster its prospects in the 2023 Assembly polls.

The chief minister reached the temple in the Nilachal Hills here around 2.45pm and left for the airport around 4pm.

“She prayed at Kamakhya temple and three other temples located nearby and did parikrama before leaving,” a priest told The Telegraph.

Rajya Sabha member Sushmita Dev, who tweeted Mamata’s arrival in Guwahati, told The Telegraph that it was a “private” visit by the chief minister to offer her “prayers to Ma Kamakhya and seek her blessings”. “I was there from Guwahati and her boudi (from Calcutta) accompanied her. It was a very private visit,” Dev said.

There had been reports that Mamata would go to Shillong from Guwahati but a party source said the chief minister dropped the idea because people there would be busy with Christmas festivities. “It would have been inappropriate to talk politics amid Christmas festivities,” the source said.

After Tripura, the party has been trying to expand its base in Meghalaya in the Northeast before the 2023 Assembly polls. Last month, 12 of the 17 Congress MLAs from Meghalaya, including former chief minister Mukul Sangma, switched loyalty to Trinamul.

Trinamul’s landslide victory in the CMC polls was celebrated in Tripura with party members in Agartala organising a Vijay Utsav by applying colours on each other, distributing sweets and raising slogans such as “khela hobe” and “Trinamul zindabad.”

They said the victory in Calcutta was a vote for Mamata’s development agenda and they would take the development message to every household in Tripura so that the party could emerge as a force before the Assembly polls.

Tripura Trinamul convener Subal Bhowmik told The Telegraph that the massive win in Calcutta would boost the party’s growth before the 2023 Assembly polls because of the “strong link” between the people of Tripura and Bengal.

“The party’s popularity will further increase in Tripura because people of both the states are closely linked. The win will have a positive impact on our party here. We have several party programmes lined up in a couple of weeks,” Bhowmik said.

Trinamul has been trying to expand its organisation in Tripura for the 2023 polls soon after the party’s win in the Bengal Assembly elections. However, Trinamul faces an uphill task against the ruling BJP in Tripura going by the result of the recent urban body polls in which the party won only one seat. The BJP won over 90 per cent of the seats.