The ruling BJP in Tripura swept the three-tier panchayat polls held on August 8, a mandate which the Opposition Left Front described as “rigged from the outset”.

The counting of ballots which began around 8am on Monday ended around 9am on Tuesday but the State Election Commission (SEC) website could upload only 99 per cent of the results on its website till 7pm, which an Opposition leader described “as deliberately slowed by BJP counting agents on one pretext or the other".

According to the SEC, which conducted the polls, the ruling BJP has won 113 of the 116 zilla parishad seats while two went to the Congress and one to the CPM. The BJP won 5,883 gram panchayat seats of the 6,280 for which the results were declared till 7pm. There are in all 6,370 seats of which the BJP had won 71 per cent uncontested.
The ruling party further bagged 403 panchayat samiti seats of the 419 for which results were declared by the SEC till 7pm.

There are 423 panchayat seats spread over eight districts of the state which has been under BJP-led dispensation since 2018.

An SEC official said it takes time to sort out the ballots as it is a three-tier polling.