AGARTALA: Charging that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its ally TIPRA Motha Party’s top leaders are meeting and planning further ethnic polarization ahead of the Village Council elections, Tripura Pradesh Congress on Sunday alleged that Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) chief Mohan Bhagwat’s recent Tripura visit was connected to this political strategy.
Addressing a press conference at Pradesh Congress Bhavan here in Agartala on Sunday, Congress state spokesperson Prabir Chakraborty warned that Tripura risks descending into a Manipur-like crisis if the state government continues to shield those engineering communal unrest.
Chakraborty alleged that the two main ruling partners deliberately scripted a “fake war drama” during the TTAADC elections, exchanging personal attacks and ethnically divisive remarks to divert public attention from real issues of corruption, unemployment, law and order breakdown, and the basic problems facing tribal areas.
“When kings wage wars, it is the ordinary people who pay with their lives. That is precisely the situation being created in the hills of this state,” he said.
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Chakraborty further explained that the effort to build tensions in the hills and plains around the TTAADC elections began as far back as the five-state election period and has continued uninterrupted since. He alleged that even after the TTAADC polls, BJP and TIPRA Motha top leaders have been engaged in mutual praise, and that meetings involving RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat’s Tripura visit point to a pre-designed roadmap for deeper ethnic polarization ahead of the Village Council elections, with the 2028 assembly elections as the ultimate target.
However, Chakraborty also raised pointed questions over the torching of a TIPRA Motha youth leader’s vehicle in Mandwi and the 48-hour bandh and road blockades that followed, alleging that police inaction in these incidents is deeply troubling.
“Even police officers who tried to maintain law and order were attacked. The government is doing nothing but issuing empty threats on paper while those responsible go unpunished,” he alleged.
Chakraborty noted that economically vulnerable tribal communities have suffered the most from the manufactured unrest and that even the ruling party’s own local leaders and workers have not been spared.
Congress has called upon all tribal and non-tribal peace-loving people of the state to unite, asserting that a democratic and peaceful movement is the only way to resist the politics of division.