A Vote Against Violence

The Assembly elections in Tripura did not turn out to be as 'tough' as had been predicted by none otherthan the ruling Communist Party of India - Marxist (CPI-M) party secretary, Baidyanath Mazumder. At one stage,the CPI-M led Left Front, appeared to losing ground in the face of a determined assault by the banned NationalLiberation Front of Tripura (NLFT) militants and their political front, the Indigenous Nationalist Party ofTripura (INPT). The INPT brought together two separate political parties - the erstwhile Tripura Upjati JubaSamity (TUJS) and Indigenous Peoples Front of Tripura (IPFT), and claimed to represent 'tribal interests' inthe State.

There was also an intensive campaign of intimidation by the militants in the hilly interiors, with the messagegoing out that additional security arrangements for the elections would not protect the tribal electorate forlong, and unless the INPT won all the seats they were contesting, a blood-bath would follow. This was why LeftFront leaders, including Chief Mnister Manik Sarkar had frantically pressed the Union Home Ministry andElection Commission for additional forces to ensure that the tribals could cast their votes. As a result, morethan 37,000 extra men, including Army contingents, were deployed, in addition to the force already on duty incounter-insurgency operations in Tripura, creating a ratio of one security man for every 25 voters.

The overwhelming security had a major impact, and the tribals in most of the constituencies, excluding a fewbooths in each, turned out in large numbers to cast their ballots and the CPI-M secured thirteen of thereserved twenty tribal seats, wresting one from the INPT, the Bagma constituency of south Tripura which hadbeen won in five consecutive elections since 1977 by Ratimohan Jamatya, who conceded defeat this time by asmall margin of 74 votes.

A profound quiet seems to have descended on Tripura, with the Congress-INPT trying to come to terms with theirelectoral reverses, and the ruling Left Front reviewing the realities of the retention of power for a recordfifth - and a third consecutive - term.

Before the election the direct threat of militant intervention had cast a deep shadow over the Left Front'sprospects. It was the banned NLFT's guns which had ousted the Front from power in the controversial AutonomousDistrict Council (ADC) elections in April-May 2000. 537 CPI-M tribal leaders and workers have been liquidatedby the militants over the past five years, and another 56 persons - including security forces personnel andmilitants themselves - had been killed in the current year.

Below the surface peace imposed by the heavy and unprecedented deployment of security forces, it is evidentthat the militants did influence polling in many of the reserved tribal seats.

Nothing illustrates this better than the defeat of senior CPI-M leader and Tribal Welfare Minister AghoreDebbarma in the Pramodnagar reserved Assembly constituency in Khowai subdivision by a margin of less than 400votes. Debbarma had won in 1998 by 4,993 votes, and the Marxists have lost this seat for the first time since1952, allegedly because of irregularities in two booths where tribal people were forced by the militants tocast their votes in favour of Animesh Debbarma, who is said to have close connections with the NLFT rebels.

A drastic reduction of the CPI-M's victory margins in the tribal reserved constituencies in Ramchandraghat,Asharambari and Krishanpur in Khowai subdivision, the Simna constituency in the Sadar subdivision, and theCharilam reserve constituency in the Bishalgarh subdivision, were all eloquent commentary on the influence ofguns.

The NLFT rebels saw to it that a large number of tribal workers and supporters of the ruling front did notturn up to cast ballots. In another traditional bastion of CPI-M, Kanchanpur, the party candidate RajendraReang won by a single vote against an NLFT collaborator of the same name, simply because at least five boothsin remote interiors bordering Bangladesh had been inaccessible to the CPI-M nominee, who had lost his fatherand a cousin to NLFT's bullets before the election.

Yet, for all its efforts, the INPT could add only one more seat to their tally of five in the outgoingAssembly. In south Tripura, which has been relatively free from the militant menace over the past three years,the Left Front has made a near clean sweep, winning 13 out of 14 seats including, three of the four reservedtribal seats.

The overriding issue in the elections was militancy, and the Congress alliance with a party backed bymilitants polarised the voting. Even in its strongholds, the Congress party's margin of victory - as in theplains areas, dominated by the majority non-tribal voters - was dramatically reduced in most constituencies,including the four seats in Agartala town.

The adoption, virtually in toto, of the INPT-NLFT line by the Congress was the main reason for this loss ofsupport. INPT leader and ex-militant, Bijay Kumar Hrangkhawal's speech in Geneva in July last year, where hehad spoken in favour of the banned militants by describing their genocidal politics as a 'struggle forself-determination' and his questioning of the erstwhile princely Tripura's merger with the Indian Union had avery adverse impact on the non-tribal voters.

To worsen matters Hrangkhawal appeared to be dictating terms to the Congress in a public rally held atAgartala in September last. But the state Congress leadership never protested or even appeared to have a voiceagainst Hrangkahwal and his henchmen.

All through the campaign, the Congress leadership, dependent for political survival on the majoritynon-tribal voters, kept on echoing the INPT line. At the election rally addressed by Party President SoniaGandhi at Agartala on February 23, she shared the dais with Bijay Hrangkhawal and PCC president Birajit Sinha(who belongs to the minuscule minority Manipuri community), with former chief ministers and veteran Congressleaders standing below the dais.

As could be expected, this did not impact well on voters, who voted the Left Front back to power despite astate-wide anti-incumbency wave as a result of the earlier regimes failure to curb insurgency and risingunemployment. The Left Front has, thus, rightly characterised the electoral outcome as a 'vote againstmilitancy and terrorism'.

The tribals, who have been the worst victims of militancy in recent years, have given a mandate for peaceby coming out to vote despite intimidation. If militant intervention could have been totally checked, it isclear that the INPT would have been hard put event to hold on to their strength of five in the sixty-memberAssembly.

Sekhar Datta in Agartala is the Principal Correspondent, The Telegraph. Courtesy: South AsiaIntelligence Review of the South Asia Terrorism Portal