Lok Sabha election 2019: Tripura heads for a crunch election
A political observer who does not want to be named comments on the cycles of violence in Tripura and says that it is the same people that had switched over from the CPI(M) to the RSS and then the BJP.
The rains in Tripura’s capital, Agartala, caused a blackout across the city. In the Communist Party of India (Marxist) office, former MP and minister Sankar Prasad Datta sits with two party colleagues in candle light. He has three things to say. That Tripura is self-sufficient in electricity. That the real darkness was the decimation of the CPI(M) a year ago by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in a saffron sweep of the state election. And that now, in the general election season, his car and those of his party colleagues, have been pelted with stones and attacked by members of the BJP and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS).
In Sonamura town, 55 kilometres away and almost on the Bangladesh border, the BJP candidate for Tripura West, Pratima Bhowmik, is preparing to address a massive rally of women party workers. She says she is a Sanghi through and through .
“When the Babri Masjid was demolished in 1992 (in Ayodhya, UP),” she said, “I was really harassed by the CPI(M) and the Congress, so much that I had to flee my home for an entire year.” “People said I was part of the mob that had gone to Uttar Pradesh to demolish the Babri mosque but I had not. A relative had died and I had gone to commiserate. But Sonamura is a predominantly Muslim area — of the 400 households in my village, only 41 are Hindu. I had joined the BJP and the RSS a year before Babri. So everyone said I had gone there. People would taunt my parents and say, ‘There goes the mother of the Masjid breaker’. It wasn’t Muslims, it was more the Hindus that would say this,” Bhowmik said.
Still, there was enough in the region, which has enough of a partition history, for the RSS to leverage. It tried to, but with the CPI(M) cadre in place in the state, the Sangh didn’t get much traction, until the Modi government was elected in 2014. RSS leader Sunil Deodhar was appointed the main agent of change in Tripura.
Deodhar explains how he spotted potential in Biplab Deb, the current chief minister who was working as an assistant to an MP from Madhya Pradesh but had also been in the RSS for a long time. “It took me six months to convince him to leave his job and move to Tripura,” Deodhar says. The team that he put in place sensed that the Hindu Bangladeshi refugee sentiment combined with a palpable fatigue with the CPI(M) could be exploited. The plan worked and last year, the BJP won the assembly election in the state. This year, the BJP is hoping its plan to implement the Citizenship Amendment Bill (CAB) will help it continue its ride in the state. The bill, part of the party’s manifesto, considers all non-Muslim refugees from neighbouring countries to be Indian citizens.
Ashok Sinha, the BJP spokesperson for Tripura, said, “There has been an influx of infiltrators, mostly Muslims, from across the Bangladesh border, and this bill is meant to stop this.”
The controversial bill sparked protests in Tripura in January. The BJP’s coalition partner, tribal party IPFT, almost pulled out of the alliance and the opposition Congress put emphasis on the issue in its campaign. But Sinha appeared to be downplaying the matter, saying “it is not a big election issue at all”.
But on the ground, it seemed to have complicated the plot for the party.
Campaigning in the hills in the Dhalai district in the pouring rain, the BJP’s candidate for Tripura East, Rebati Mohan Das, is caught in a strange predicament stemming from the tension between the hill people and the Bengalis in the plains. He is speaking in Bengali to around 40 booth-level workers; only four of the people at the meeting speak the language more current in the hills – Kokborok.
In response to a question on CAB, Das says he has “looked at it on the internet but I haven’t gone into the details.”
A Hindi-speaking volunteer from Delhi, part of Deodhar’s team, steps in and expounds on the virtues of the bill. But it comes unstuck almost immediately. A young booth-level worker says: “I don’t agree with the bill. It’s not good for the Northeast,” he said. Realising his mistake, he adds that “it’s good for the rest of the country,” but the damage is done. The discussion is wound up quickly.
Back in Agartala, Subal Bhowmik is visibly distressed as he narrates how he joined the BJP in 2013 but found that it was driven by the same cadre-based gangs — as the CPI(M) — that operated by instilling fear in party members and among followers. After being state vice-president of the party, he became a dissident and eventually quit the party in March. He returned to the Congress party where he spent a lifetime as a career politician. Bhowmik says he was inspired to join the BJP because he had already gravitated towards the RSS. After two years in the Sangh, he decided to be part of the party. Now, disgruntled and back in the Congress, Bhowmik says there is no difference in Tripura between the cadre of the BJP and the CPI(M).
“Humney sirf Chief Minister change kiya hai, baaki sab waise hi hai. Hooliganism, wagaira toh theek hai isko bhi face karenge, bahut saal se aadat hai,” he said (we’ve only changed chief ministers in Tripura. Everything else is exactly the same - the hooliganism. Well okay, we’ll face it, we’re used to it around here for so many years.) He was attacked thrice after switching sides and campaigning for the Congress.
Another political observer who does not want to be named comments on the cycles of violence in Tripura and says that it is the same people that had switched over from the CPI(M) to the RSS and then the BJP.
In this election season, one of India’s smallest and most vulnerable states appears to be very volatile.
(Revati Laul is an independent journalist and film-maker and the author of ‘The Anatomy of Hate’, published by Westland/Context in December 2018. She tweets @revatilaul)