Does the outcome of localized Indian elections have a bearing on South Asia in general and Bangladesh in particular? In certain instances, yes. The Indian state of Tripura, directly to Bangladesh's east, is a case in point.
Bangladesh shares an 850 km-plus international border with Tripura; it envelops Tripura to its north, west and south. Tripura also shares a unique relationship with Bangladesh that is both bittersweet history and an ambitious future that sets it apart in attitude and application from any other Indian state. Indeed, I have for long maintained that Tripura has developed a foreign policy attitude that in some ways has robustly supplemented India's relationship with Bangladesh with trade, transhipment, and energy security.
On March 2, Tripura completed general elections to its assembly; as did Nagaland and Meghalaya -- another Indian state with which Bangladesh shares an occasionally tense border, but more on those dynamics in another column. A Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-led alliance comfortably won the elections to Tripura's assembly for a consecutive five-year term. That was expected.
What was not, in an arc that began as recently as two years ago, is the spectacular surge of TIPRA Motha. That party went from not having existed to winning 13 seats in the state's 60-seat assembly. Significantly, the Motha is rooted not in the Bengali identity with which so many in Bangladesh -- and even India -- associate Tripura, but a solidly rooted indigenous Tripuri, not-Bengali identities and aspiration. TIPRA stands for Tiprasa Indigenous Progressive Regional Alliance.
All this is touched by a curious interlinked history with emphatic outcomes.
A history lesson
The kingdom of Tripura was ruled by the Manikya kings in a nearly unbroken line from the 15th century CE -- the 13th century, if you consider the semi-mythical Ratna Fa --until 1949. On October 15 that year, the kingdom of Tripura's merger with India formally took effect. Meanwhile, Tripura's tryst with an emotive and sometimes violent future and the schism between the massively migratory Bengalis and long-resident non-Bengalis, had already been set in motion.
It diluted the conviviality of the times when Bengalis were made welcome. Tripura's kings encouraged Bengali administrators and teachers, even cultivators. The Rajmala, a chronicle of the kings of Tripura, begun in the mid-15th century CE during the rule of Dharma Manikya I, was commissioned to be written in Bengali.
Rabindranath Tagore was a favourite of the Manikyas, beginning with Bir Chandra Manikya. A story goes like this: The king was desolate after the death of his queen, Bhanumati, in 1881 and found solace in the young Tagore's poem Bhogno Hridoy -- A Broken Heart. He sent word of appreciation to Tagore in Kolkata and offered to print his works on hearing that the poet was being dismissed by Bengali littérateurs. His successor, Radhakishore Manikya, invited Tagore to Tripura. Tripura's treasury helped Visva-Bharati, Tagore's dream university in Shantiniketan, take shape. Tagore was quite giddy with it all. He wrote: “When the woodlands of Tripura have sent out invitations to their floral feast through their courier of the south wind, I have come as a friend.”
That goodwill rapidly evaporated.
Migration, irrevocably propelled by faith-based politics in Bengal, transformed Tripura from an overwhelmingly tribal entity which answered to a “Tripuri” or “Tiprasa” umbrella comprising several ethnicities -- principally Borok, Reang, Noatia, Halam, besides other tribes -- into an overwhelmingly Bengali one.
Bengalis swamped Tripura, arriving as refugees in the Partition and post-partition years. In 1952, close to a quarter of a million refugees poured in, dwarfing even the near 2,00,000 of a year earlier. Pakistan's piecemeal conflict with India over 1964-1965 drew more than a hundred thousand.
In 1971, Pakistan's butchery in soon-to-be-Bangladesh opened the floodgates. Tripura's population of about a million and half at the time -- already majority Bengali -- swelled by a third, according to a US State Department memo. Doinik Shongbad, a daily newspaper in Agartala, in mid-1971 estimated refugees at nearly 1.3 million.
Nearly all were Bengali.
Between 1941 and 1951, years of the decadal census, the percentage of indigenous folk in Tripura dropped from a little over 53% to a little over 37%. By 1981 it had dropped below 30%. The Census of 2011 shows the tribal population hovering just above 30%. Today, mainstream Tripura is about 70% Bengali.
The government, administration, trade, discourse, and language also turned Bengali. I have seen advertisements by the Tripura Public Service Commission for jobs that mandate the knowledge of Bengali as “Desirable.” Some jobs are more ethnically tempered, listing as “desirable” the “knowledge of Bengali or KokBorok” (the official languages of Tripura are Bangla and Kok Borok. The latter remains more form than substance).
For all practical purposes, the Tripuri had become aliens in their own land.
Partition and its effects
Besides incendiary ethno-political outcomes, Partition also robbed Tripura of a direct link with what is sometimes called “Mainland India.” Trade and industry remained basic. Agriculture was, for decades, the primary activity. Only in this millennium would Tripura's resources, like natural gas, come of age and new geopolitical and geo-economic realities in which Bangladesh plays a part would spark growth and hope. More on this shortly.
Trouble was inevitable. It began in the mid-1960s with youth-led movements for restoration of traditional tribal lands and official recognition for Kok Borok. It took until 1978, and the arrival of an armed group, Tripura National Volunteers, or TNV, for the largely Bengali government to pay attention.
A move by a newly-elected communist government to restore tribal lands backfired. Several hundred Bengalis, grouped under the radical Amra Bangali, began a cycle of violent protests. Matters escalated. Eighteen hundred people, mostly Bengali, ultimately lost their lives in clashes between tribals and non-tribals. Several thousand homes were destroyed. The Indian Army had to intervene.
It would be nearly a decade before TNV entered peace negotiations for a better deal for tribal folk, but even after, indigenous peoples' enclaves continued to remain the most undeveloped in Tripura.
Unsurprisingly, a slew of new militant groups sprang up.
The lessening of militancy has taken a mixture of governance and gradual change of bilateral equations between Bangladesh and India -- from occasionally inimical to largely cooperative. Sanctuary has come to mean less a refuge for militants and more a mutually beneficial future.
This increasingly cooperative relationship is predicated on regional realpolitik and increasing ties in trade, investment and vastly greater people-to-people contacts. If there is the so-called “Neighbourhood First” policy of India, a belated realization to mend ties in South Asia, there is the neighbourhood-always reality that Bangladesh has necessarily practiced.
The past rooted in Partition dynamics and the trauma of 1971 is now morphed to a present that seeks to mitigate poverty, migration and the climate crisis through a ramping up of socio-economic growth on both sides of the Bangladesh-India border.
‘Get it done'
This attitude took root in Tripura in this millennium. A communist government led by Manik Sarkar, who was chief minister for a four-term run from 1998 to 2018, was emphatic in a range of matters from security to securing trade routes. “Shaira fyalao,” get it done, is a phrase commonly associated with this politician with roots in eastern Bengal. Sarkar became an unlikely beacon of bilateralism and regionalism.
Aggressive policing, deft politics, increasing development and border controls reduced insurgency to a trickle. Equally, over the years Tripura -- its economics, politics and administration controlled by the majority Bengali population -- realized that, while its hydrocarbon reserves would fuel its future, alongside the state's improving infrastructure, the locational advantage in relation to Bangladesh's modernizing waterways, port and rail networks would help to sustain it.
By itself and as a significant piece in India's Look-East/Act-East geopolitical and geo-economic jigsaw, Tripurasaw a need to move ahead, and ditch an economy of conflict for an economy of peace.
And, it would work to integrate itself with the sub-region. The stress was on Tripura-with-Bangladesh as much as India-with-Bangladesh, because Tripura had evidently decided it would chart its own course, and drag India's foreign and trade policies by the collar to catch up.
Natural gas evolved to become one of two biggest tickets to prosperity for Tripura, the second being trade and transhipment. In 2013, with the commissioning of a major power station in Palatana fuelled by that gas, the state was enabled to handle its own power needs and contribute to neighbouring Indian provinces; and also lessen the need for expensive hydroelectricity projects that bring the attendant misery of massive displacement.
Alongside supplying electricity from ONGC-Tripura Power Company's Palatana project to Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Nagaland and Mizoram, Tripura has for several years exported electricity to Bangladesh.
It's a telling karmic loop.
Bangladesh permitted transhipment of equipment for this very power plant in March 2011, using waterways -- in this case, up to Ashuganj port on the Meghna -- and then travelling by road southeast to Akhaura close to the busy border checkpoint a few kilometres shy of Tripura's capital, Agartala (Bangladesh maintains a diplomatic office here -- an “Assistant High Commission”).
More precedent followed, like transhipment of rice by the state-run Food Corporation of India to Tripura through Bangladesh. There is an ongoing road and railway project to link Agartala to the border town of Sabroom and then on to Chittagong port for further links to various points on the Indian seaboard.
The arrival of a BJP-led government in Tripura in early-2018 -- and renewed for a second term last week -- has not diminished the sub-regional and regional plays begun during the Sarkar era. And, unlike Assam, where a BJP-led government has literally run riot, in Tripura the party has in the past two years reined in aggressive religion-based ultra-nationalistic rhetoric.
The arrival to the game of a determined TIPRA Motha, which has built on its stunning victory in the state's indigenous autonomous district council elections in 2021, now capped with an impressive showing for a voice in the state legislature, is unlikely to diminish Tripura's outreach with, and via, Bangladesh. Because, the game has gone from inequity and imbalance to ensuring equity and balance.
Pradyot Manikya, scion of Tripura's royal family and leader of the Motha, who easily balances belting out rock classics like Bon Jovi's It's My Life with his lineage and his canny positioning as a messiah of Tripura's indigenous folk, knows it too. The old ways are done. The new way is about securing productive futures. For everyone.
Sudeep Chakravarti is Director, Center for South Asian Studies at University of LiberalArts Bangladesh. He has authored several books on history, ethnography, conflict resolution,and eastern South Asia. His most recent book is ‘The Eastern Gate: War and Peace in Nagaland,Manipur and India's Far East' (Simon and Schuster, 2022).
