Chugging smoothly along the broad gauge tracks wedged between endless rubber plantations, the Agartala-Silchar Express would reach its destination, the state capital, in less than an hour. Having exhausted his stock of beverages and water bottles, hawker Kalipada Sarkar sat by the train door, appearing tired, yet content. “Aibo, aibo, BJP oi abar aibo… amrai jaani chandabazi ki jinish (The BJP is returning, only we know what forced subscriptions mean for people like us)”. Ram Mandir, dhara 370, BBC — emotive issues which have earned the BJP rich dividends elsewhere — are no pull for Sarkar, whose affinity towards that party are for other reasons. “My day used to start with paying subscriptions to some wing of the party or other, which seemed endless. And on top of that, we were forced to take up subscriptions of the party mouthpiece,” Sarkar told me.
In its moment of triumph, while the Northeast offers the BJP many reasons to cheer, its opponents, who stand diminished, could do with much-needed introspection. While it may not register with many uninitiated in Tripura’s political history, Sarkar offered a cogent reasoning to not trust the Left, whose tenure in power saw the perpetuation of what academics describe as “party-society”, essentially a societal structure where the presence of the Party is all pervasive. That, claimed Sarkar and so did many others, was not the case anymore, notwithstanding the BJP’s failings on other counts such as generating employment, bringing industries, improving education and healthcare services.
For a party which could have been summarily dismissed as a non-entity in the Northeast less than a decade ago, the BJP has gradually transformed into the primary pole of the region’s politics. After Assam, where it posted two consecutive victories in 2016 and 2021, on Thursday the party retained power in Tripura, fending off the combined might of the Left-Congress combine and the spirited campaign of the indigenous outfit Tipra Motha. In Meghalaya, the party’s gambit to go solo by snapping ties with the National People’s Party did not pay off. But it is its victory in Tripura, the once formidable red bastion, which will resonate beyond the region’s boundaries for its ideological underpinnings.
In 2018, the party swept to power promising the fruits of a “double engine government”, as the Left reeled under anti-incumbency, capturing the space vacated by a listless Congress. For much of its term, the party seemed to totter, as infighting threatened to corrode its ranks, under a chief minister who made more news for making comical statements than governance. Yet, and even the BJP’s detractors will admit, the state saw a marked shift in delivery of welfare schemes and public services, be it construction of housing, toilets, allowances for the disadvantaged, and rations to people, irrespective of party affiliation. The BJP’s attempts to course correct, including in the form of replacing Deb with the mild-mannered maxillofacial surgeon Manik Saha, barely nine months ahead of the polls, also appears to have paid off. One of the first steps that Saha took after taking over was restraining the “bike bahini”, referring to motorcycle-borne miscreants who sought to terrorise political rivals and their families, sparking resentment among the people.
But the culture of political violence is not new to the state. It was a key reason why the Left-Congress experiment did not click. As a voter told this reporter ahead of the polls, “They want us to vote for the same Left which kept us deprived just because we were branded a Congress family? The same Left whose all-powerful local committee leaders routinely intimidated us?” Right from the beginning, there was a big question mark over the potential of any alliance between the two, with many arguing that transfer of votes between the two parties — an essential prerequisite for an alliance to work — may not happen. In the end, in a repeat of the 2016 Assembly polls in West Bengal when the Left and the Congress had fought jointly, the arrangement came a cropper. There are clear indications that while the Congress gained from Left votes, the reverse did not happen.
Yet, the results, particularly the rise of Tipra Motha on the plank of a separate ethnic homeland, also underline that the ethnic and cultural fault lines that animate a large section of the state, which saw the indigenous communities reduced to a minority due to the influx of waves of displaced Bengalis from erstwhile East Pakistan, and the larger region, remain alive and festering. Indeed, the fall in insurgency and relative peace in the region since the Narendra Modi government came to power in 2014 was one of the centrepieces of the BJP’s campaign in Tripura, Nagaland as well as Meghalaya. And official statistics show that these claims were not the usual poll hyperbole.
Take Nagaland, which continues to be relatively restive: It registered 77 insurgency incidents in 2014, including the death of one civilian and 65 kidnappings. In 2020 and 2021, however, no civilian or security personnel was recorded as having fallen to the bullets of insurgents. This excludes the deaths of six civilians, and seven more who died in the ensuing violence, in a botched Army operation in the state’s Mon district in 2021.
Significantly, the BJP’s gains in Nagaland, a Christian-majority state, have come despite the influential church advising people to guard against “communal forces”. At the risk of overreading the import of this development, this is also an indication that in parts of India where the BJP’s ideological moorings were among its biggest impediments, stalling its growth, people may have started to reward its earnestness in making a case for itself.
sourav.barman@expressindia.com
Prime Minister Narendra Modi with BJP President J P Nadda and Union Minister Amit Shah during the victory celebrations at the BJP HQ in New Delhi, after the party's good performance in Nagaland, Tripura and Meghalaya Assembly polls. (Express photo by Amit Mehra)
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