Pradyot hints at ‘big things to come in 2 months’, says Centre not playing with tribal sentiments

Pradyot said that over the past few days he had been receiving many calls about a party delegation’s meeting with home ministry officials in New Delhi. “We went to Delhi. We placed our demand for Greater Tipraland before them. Now Delhi will have to come to us and give us their reply. But none can get anything if they bow down and speak weakly. There are many people who don’t want TIPRA Motha, IPFT or Tiprasa (tribals) to speak to the central government. They have their own agenda. They want to do politics, they want power,” he said.

Pradyot said that some people in the state, not the central government, were playing with the tribals’ sentiments. “They speak sweet but stab us in the back,” he said, without specifying who they were.

“We want rights. We have decided not to do politics for the next two months but to give something to our community. Politics will continue for life, but if tribals can work together and speak in one voice for Tipraland or Greater Tipraland irrespective of party differences this time, the Centre will have to look at us seriously.”

Though Motha and the IPFT have often been at loggerheads in the past two years, Pradyot seemed to have found a new friend in the ruling party. “This is not the time for politics. This is the time for unity… Our discussion and negotiation with the Government of India has reached such a level that tribals might get many things in the next two months. But this can happen only if we can place our word peacefully and unitedly,” he said.

Pradyot said it was for the tribals to tell the central government that “this state was ours, this kingdom was ours and we were the owners”. “Yes, we are not that today but we will talk to you only if you give us our rights, or else we will not talk to you. The time is to look in the eyes and talk, not to show our weakness in public,” he said.

With the statement that Tripura belongs to tribals, Pradyot appeared to try to cash in on the appeal of his family, which used to run the erstwhile Manikya dynasty that ruled the region. The royal appeal has helped him and, before him, his parents. His father Kirit Bikram Kishore Manikya Bahadur and his mother Bibhu Kumari Devi used to be Congress MPs, the latter having served also as a minister in the state.

However, the time frame of two months that Pradyot talked about has not been corroborated by anyone, since there is no hint from senior BJP leaders about any major decision coming along the lines of a separate autonomous state or direct funding for Tripura Tribal Autonomous Area District Council.

Even Pradyot’s own party colleagues have refrained from speaking openly about details of the New Delhi meeting. While Pradyot earlier said the home ministry officials heard out their demands “patiently”, Opposition leader Animesh Debbarma said the meeting was held with the ministry’s advisor for Northeast affairs, not with any “interlocutor”.

Meanwhile, his appeal for unity comes in the face of comments from Chief Minister Manik Saha that Motha was suffering from “its own problems”. And CPM state secretary Jitendra Chaudhury, who was seen hobnobbing with Pradyot before the Assembly polls, recently alleged that a secret understanding between Motha and the BJP was what helped the saffron party to come back to power.

With the 2024 Parliament polls close by and bypolls likely to be held in the Dhanpur and Boxanagar Assembly constituencies soon, Motha is trying to secure some benefit from the central government to ground its political future on. One of the two Lok Sabha seats in the state is reserved for Scheduled Tribes.

Tipraland—a separate state for Tripura’s tribals—has been the core political demand of the Indigenous Peoples Front of Tripura, an alliance partner of the ruling BJP. However, the Opposition TIPRA Motha rose largely by weaning away IPFT and Congress supporters after the party was floated in 2021. Many from other parties, including the BJP and the CPM, also joined Motha, especially after it swept the 2021 TTAADC polls, barely two months after the party was born.

TIPRA Motha was formed with the core agenda of carving out Greater Tipraland, essentially an extension of Tipraland, demanded by the IPFT. Initially the demand was for the proposed state to include all the tribal people of Tripura. But proponents of Greater Tipraland later sought to cover Tiprasa or Tripuris spread across other states such as Assam and Mizoram as well as those living in Bandarban, Chittagong, Khagrachari and other border areas of neighbouring Bangladesh under a development council. The demand later went through a series of changes and was finally limited to a separate autonomous tribal state.