Ethnic tensions fuelled for electoral gains in Tripura

AGARTALA, May 15: It upset the teacher when he heard the Riyang boys discuss a duckshoot and not the sums on the blackboard. It upset him e...

AGARTALA, May 15: It upset the teacher when he heard the Riyang boys discuss a duckshoot and not the sums on the blackboard. It upset him even more when he realised that his class was discussing not a sport over the weekend but the manner in which non-tribals, mostly Bengalis, fleeing their torched homes, had been mowed down in Khowai by tribal insurgents.

In Marxist-ruled Tripura, there have been so many such duckshoots’ in the recent past that people are beginning to lose count. The official toll alone speaks of some 300 killed by tribal insurgents in the last 15 months.

The CPM-led Left Front Government is not prepared to let the Army take charge, aware that a nod now could cost the party dear in the Assembly elections due next year. In fact, the State Government has begun talking in terms of rolling back soon the few Army columns present here.

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As it is, the controls of the security operations are in civilian hands, coordinated by the Chief Secretary.

Too far away from Delhi to invite scrutiny other than casual and routine, Tripura today sits on a powder keg which, as an official puts it, is practically waiting to be kindled.

Ethnic tensions, fuelled in no small measure by the Left Front and the Congress for obvious electoral gains, are now increasingly being reflected in organised massacres of hapless villagers and the trapping of nervous securitymen.

The latest pointers to this have been the gunning down of 40 villagers in Khowai in February and, more recently, the May 7 ambush in Amarpur where 18 CRPF personnel and a Home Guard died after they walked into a trap believed to have been laid by cadres of the National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT) and the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN-Issac Muivah faction).

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Officials in Agartala admit to genuine fears of retaliatory attacks and reprisals each time armed outfits like the NLFT and the All Tripura Tiger Force (ATTF), in the name of championing the tribal cause, decide to go marauding.

To top it all, the securitymen, most of whom are new to the terrain, are conscious of the fact that their activities are being constantly monitored by State officials and that they are not free to go all out.

It is no secret that this ethnic divide between the tribals and non-tribals has been encouraged and sustained over the years by both the CPM and the Congress.

If today the Congress is accused of having used the Tripura National Volunteers (TNV) of Bijoy Hrangkhawl as a stepping stone to power in the late Eighties, the same goes for the CPM which created the All Tripura Tribal Force (the Tiger Force which is active now is an off-shoot of this outfit) to suit its interests.

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The State’s ailing Chief Minister Dasrath Deb was in fact one of the first to float an organisation — he established the Tripura Rajya Ganamukti Parishad way back in 1948 — to protect tribal interests.

The immediate provocation then had been the large scale migration of Bengali Hindus, fleeing from the newly created East Pakistan.