People's Democracy

EVEN though the next assembly elections in Tripura are quite far away, a campaign of terror has already got under way. The target is the Left Front and its government that have been the tried and trusted supporters of the backward and toiling masses of the state.

At Golaghati, West Tripura on December 6 afternoon, NLFT extremists kidnapped a local CPI(M) youth leader, Pran Gour Singh. His beheaded body, submerged in water in marshy land, was discovered by peasants next morning. The extremists had barbarically thrown his head at some distance, after severing it from the body.

It is with these very barbaric extremists that the anti-Left Front opposition parties in the state have now been collaborating, with a view to unleashing a terror campaign against the Left Front. On December 3, to press certain preposterous demands, the Congress had given a call for 24-hour Tripura bandh. On the other hand, the people of Halahali in Dhalai district captured and handed over to the police an NLFT extremist and chased away four other extremists whom the people saw coming out of the local Congress office and joining in the picketing in front of the government office alongwith 10 Congress activists. The local Congress leader Harendra Das, who was Congress candidate in the last assembly election, pleaded frantically with the police to get the extremists released, but in vain.

Again on December 7, the police arrested a TUJS leader Joy Chandra Jamatia near Udaipur, South Tripura, on charge of extorting money in the area on behalf of NLFT extremists for some time past. Acting on a tip-off, the police caught him red-handed when he was handing over to the NLFT men Rs 5175 collected through extortion. His accomplice too was arrested.

The TUJS has already announced its merger with the IPFT, the political mask of the NLFT, and the Congress has recently been desperately trying to clinch an alliance with the IPFT. The TUJS was the partner of the Congress in the 1988-93 coalition regime in Tripura. An unprincipled polarisation again appears in the offing, with the assembly polls due in early 2003. (INN)