REJOINDER TO MANISANKAR AIYAR

 Congress Is Playing With Fire In Tripura 

Gautam Das

DURING the run-up to the fast-approaching Tripura assembly polls, the Congress has entered an alliance with the Indigenous Nationalist Party of Tripura (INPT). The latter is known as the mask of an outlawed, extremist killing squad --- the National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT).

 This Congress move has invited flak from the people of Tripura and other states. Nay, this opportunist, anti-national alliance with extremist killers has created intense reaction among the party’s own rank and file. The leadership is unable to answer the questions from party activists. Many Congress activists have expressed hatred against the alliance and severed ties with the party. Above 2,500 persons have quit the Congress over the last 5 months.

GEMS OF  ‘WISDOM’

It was in the face of this situation that an AICC general secretary, Mr Manisankar Aiyar, in charge of Congress affairs in Tripura, made a futile attempt to give a clean chit to the NLFT. This was the aim of Mr Aiyar’s article “Is Bijoy Hrangkhawl Anti-National?” in November 5 issue of The Telegraph, an English daily from Kolkata. It will be noted that Hrangkhawl, who once led the TNV, is the progenitor of the NLFT.

The sum and substance of Mr Aiyar’s write-up is as follows:

a) Mr Aiyar heard Hrangkhawl’s name only after arriving in Tripura with Rajiv Gandhi. Loosening the noose around Hrangkhawl, the Left Front regime let him escape into Bangladesh, and now the CPI(M) has identified the same person as anti-national.

b) The opinion Hrangkhawl expressed in a conference in Geneva last July, that the objective of his organisation is self-determination, earned the CPI(M)’s wrath after its ‘flop’ rally.

c) The case the police have filed against Hrangkhawl has triggered an agitation among the people. The police have shot dead a number of agitators.

d) CPI(M) leaders in Delhi have raised the question how an all-India party like the Congress could ally with a dangerous force. To it, Hrangkhawl himself answered in the September 8 public meeting, and owed allegiance to the Indian constitution.

e) Dubbing education minister Anil Sarkar as the Pravin Togadia (notorious VHP leader) of Tripura, Mr Aiyar has alleged that Sarkar is inciting the Bengalis to rise in arms against the tribals. 

f) The CPI(M) has launched a whispering campaign that the INPT is the NLFT’s mask. But there is no nexus between the NLFT and INPT.

g) CPI(M) ministers cannot move without security ring. But Democratic Nationalist Alliance, against which the CPI(M) is heaping allegations, has been confronting the NLFT without any security force.

h) The CPI(M) is concealing its nexus with the ATTF extremists.

i) The CPI(M) is dependent on special police officers (SPOs).

j) The people of Tripura are seeking a change, and so on and so forth.

TAINTED ELECTION

Here we would not go into how Tripura, a princely state, joined the Indian Union in 1949. The thing to note is that over more than two decades in Tripura, the CIA/ISI-sponsored separatist groups have killed thousands of innocent people as well as officers and jawans of the security forces, while carrying out inhuman barbarities. It is in this background that the Congress has struck an unprincipled alliance with the INPT extremists to grab power in the state. Mr Aiyar’s column in The Telegraph is an attempt to conceal precisely this murky character of the Congress leadership.

As for Mr Aiyar’s statement that he heard Hrangkhawl’s name only after he came to Agartala with Rajiv Gandhi, one will note that the late prime minister Rajiv Gandhi came to Tripura twice on the eve of the 1988 elections. He first came here on November 28, 1987, addressed rallies at Dharmanagar, Khowai and Belonia, and held a press conference at Agartala airport. Then he came on January 28, 1988, a few days before the elections. Besides Mr Aiyar, the then Mizoram chief minister Lalthanhawala of the Congress was among those who then accompanied Rajiv.

The February 1988 Tripura assembly election was one of the most tainted elections in India. Rajiv Gandhi made use of the separatist Hrangkhawl’s TNV killers to undemocratically dislodge the Left Front from power. Ten days before the polls, Hrangkhawl’s squads hit various places and massacred 91 non-tribals including infants, women and the aged. However, in his address at Assam Rifles Maidan on January 28, 1988, Rajiv Gandhi held the Left Front government responsible for the massacre. At a press conference at the governor’s house next morning, he made a false allegation against the then chief minister Nripen Chakraborty and deputy chief minister Dasaratha Deb that they were the “progenitors of TNV.” He also issued a threat: “Just watch out what step I take on my return to Delhi.” Immediately after returning to Delhi, he declared on January 29 the whole state as “disturbed area” and deployed the army there three days before the polls, keeping the elected government of Tripura absolutely in dark.

As for the army that came to Tripura, it did not touch a single TNV extremist. In complete violation of the electoral code of conduct, the army was made use of in the Congress election campaign. At several booths, army officers and jawans told the voters to cast vote on hand symbol. Even after such partisan use of the army, armed rigging squads led by Santosh Mohan Deb illegally entered the counting booths and forced the returning officers to declare the Left Front’s elected candidates as “defeated.” For example, in the Majlispur assembly constituency, Deb’s rigging squad held a revolver at the returning officer Pravin Srivastav’s chest and forced him to declare the Congress candidate “elected.” Thus was changed the earlier result in which the CPI(M)’s Manik Dey was declared elected at the end of counting. In the same way, results were changed in Golaghati and some other constituencies.

It was thus that, rigging the Tripura polls with the help of the TNV killing squads and the army, Rajiv Gandhi fraudulently dislodged the Left Front from power and thrust the Congress-TUJS jungle rule on the people.

CONSPIRACY  COMES TO LIGHT

Rajiv’s heinous, secret conspiracy with Hrangkhawl came to the light within a few months. Rajiv amply rewarded Hrangkhawl for helping the Congress in capturing power in Tripura. Chief minister Sudhir Ranjan Majumder and Hrangkhawl singed a so-called memorandum in New Delhi on August 12, 1988, in Rajiv’s presence. Under this treaty, Hrangkhawl was rewarded with the chairmanship of Tripura Rehabilitation and Plantation Corporation, a state government undertaking, alongwith official residence. A number of TNV members were given government jobs while others were given a few crore rupees from the exchequer as rehabilitation grant. In the Independence Day programme in Delhi on August 15, 1988, Hrangkhawl was Rajiv Gandhi’s special guest.

But, on August 22, 1988, Zoeng, a biweekly from Mizoram’s capital Aizol, published a bunch of letters exchanged between Hrangkhawl and Rajiv via Lalthanhawala in September-October 1987. Hrangkhawl’s letter to Rajiv on October 27, 1987 contained two demands --- for immediate dismissal of the CPI(M)-led government in Tripura, and for a ceasefire. Lalthanhawala himself took this letter to Delhi and met Rajiv Gandhi. On November 28, 1987, he visited Tripura with Rajiv and, in consultation with the latter, sent a reply on December 6, 1987.

Can Mr Aiyar deny this conspiratorial communication between Rajiv and Hrangkhawl via Lalthanhawala?

HISTORY OF  CONSPIRACY

Now another falsehood in Mr Aiyar’s article: on November 28, 1987, Rajiv angrily asked the chief minister Nripen Chakraborty to answer for letting Hrangkhawl escape to Bangladesh by loosening the security noose on him. In fact, it was the Left Front government that had arrested Hrangkhawl on charge of extremist killings, for his slogan of making Tripura “independent” from India, and for sparking a terrible ethnic riot in 1980. But Hrangkhawl was granted bail by the High court after a few months. Could the Left Front government do anything about a person who was granted bail by a court? Clearly, Mr Aiyar’s charge of the LF government letting Hrangkhawl escape to Bangladesh is only to conceal the clandestine Rajiv-Hrangkhawl deal.

A secret understanding between Hrangkhawl and the Congress existed not only for the 1988 assembly elections but since long. In fact, the Congress started its anti-Left conspiracy when it failed to send a single member to the assembly in the 1978 polls. It allied with the TUJS, of which Hrangkhawl was additional general secretary. In December 1978, Hrangkhawl secretly formed the separatist TNV with a group of selected TUJS youth and sent them to the camp of Mizoram’s MNF leader Laldenga in the Bangladesh forests for arms training. At the TUJS conference at Taidu in Amarpur subdivision in March 1980, Hrangkhawl made a proposal to expel the “foreigners” --- the non-tribals that came to Tripura as refugees after 1949. Congress leader Bibhu Kumari Debi was present at this conference as a guest, and delivered a speech in support of the proposal. The TUJS then called for a 7-day Bazar Bandh in the first week of June 1980, and sparked a terrible riot in which the TNV squads massacred innocent non-tribals. On the other hand, the Anand Marg-led Amra Bengali and the Congress-led miscreants massacred innocent tribals. In fact, both sides aimed to shatter peace in Tripura and dislodge the Left Front government. Immediately after sparking the riot, the Congress raised the demand for president’s rule in Tripura. What will Mr Aiyar say about this history of the Congress hobnobbing with the killer TNV’s supremo?

SECESSIONIST  DEMAND

Mr Aiyar says: the CPI(M) is angry with Hrangkhawl for raising the demand of self-determination at the Geneva session of the Working Group of Indigenous Populations held in July.

But the only meaning of the demand of self-determination here is secession from India. In his Geneva speech, Hrangkhawl had said: “The younger generation could not compromise with the increasing incidents of negligence and treachery upon the Borok people of Tripura. Thus the National Liberation Front of Tripura and the All Tripura Tiger Force came forward to fill up the gaps demanding fundamental constitutional and human rights of the Borok people of Tripura. Their demand is right to self-determination….. They are not secessionist at all, as Tripura was never an integral part of India from time immemorial till India achieved independence.”     

While the NLFT is carrying out an armed struggle for a state separate from India, the ATTF says it does not abide by the treaty of accession of India the administration of the princely state of Tripura signed on October 15, 1949. The depredations of the NLFT and ATTF members are aimed to make Tripura independent. In his Geneva speech, Hrangkhawl supported this very secessionist demand, saying that Tripura was not at all a part of India.

As the CPI(M) has justifiably said, Hrangkhawl’s Geneva statement is against India’s integrity and sovereignty and amounts to treason. Should a person acting against our unity and integrity be pampered, instead of being charged with treason? While the CPI(M) demands that Hrangkhawl be brought to justice so as to protect the country’s unity and sovereignty, the Congress is encouraging the anti-national forces by defending his activities.

This year the Left Front’s September 14 rally in Agartala set a new record of human congregation in Tripura. The mammoth rally overflowed the Astabal Maidan and clogged all the roads of this capital town on the day. It was an unprecedented experience for the inhabitants of Agartala. The tribal and non-tribal people of Tripura conveyed their vigorous support for the Left Front by pouring into Agartala from villages and towns. A desperate Congress-INPT combine blocked the Assam-Agartala highway by felling trees across it, and threatened the rallyists with death. There is no harm, however, if persons like Mr Aiyar delude themselves by believing that the Left Front’s September 14 rally was a “flop.”  

Following the publication of Hrangkhawl’s anti-national speech in August in several newspapers, several meetings and marches all over Tripura raised the demand for legal action against him. Several parties and mass organisations took deputations to the chief minister with this demand. Scrutinising the copy of Hrangkhawl’s speech, the police filed a suo moto case against him. 

After the police filed a case against Hrangkhawl, the INPT gave the call for a 48-hour blockade at 21 spots along vital roads in the state, including the National Highway, from September 28 morning, and the Congress actively participated in it. Yet the Congress-INPT could not gather even 10,000 people. This lack of public support made the combine call off their so-called blockade movement within six hours of its start. Of the 21 spots, 20 remained peaceful.

At Satchand in Subroom subdivision, half an hour after the court arrest by a Congress leader with about 100 followers, Chandan Tripura (INPT) arrived to block the road alongwith 200 people, some of them armed. When the police came forward to arrest them, they tried to encircle and kill a police officer. When other policemen tried to rescue the latter, they too were attacked. As the lathicharge failed to disperse the violent INPT activists, the police opened fire in self-defence, leading to two deaths. The attacked police officer is still in hospital with severe head injury and slender chance of recovery. Thus the Congress-INPT are responsible for the sad death of two persons.

Could Mr Aiyar explain why such an incident happened at Satchand alone, with 20 other spots remaining trouble-free?

After having called off the agitation within 6 hours, the bankrupt Congress-INPT leadership became the butt of yet more ridicule by calling a Tripura bandh next day over the Satchand incident. Only that it was a Sunday, a weekly off for all offices, schools and businesses.

HRANGKHAWL’S  DUPLICITY

Mr Aiyar certifies that Hrangkhawl owes allegiance to Indian constitution; that the Congress has done nothing wrong in allying with INPT.

Hrangkhawl is an object of mass hatred in Tripura, as the killer of 1,574 people statewide since the June 1980 riot till August 31, 2002. But he prides himself on this genocide that has bereaved many parents, widowed many women, orphaned many children. In his Geneva speech, he said: “You will be astonished to know that it was me to form Tripura National Volunteers (TNV), an armed outfit, in 1978, with a view to fight for the Borok nation…. My achievement was tremendous. The government of India agreed to increase reserved seats for indigenous people in the state assembly of Tripura by way of constitutional amendment. I agreed to sign a memorandum of understanding with the government of India and returned home alongwith 500 volunteers on August 12, 1988.”

This shows the duplicity on part of Hrangkhawl who formed an armed outfit with the slogan of independent Tripura, led the secessionists from abroad, and claimed to be faithful to Indian constitution in the joint election rally with the Congress. Dreaming to capture power with the help of INPT rifles, the Congress leadership has made a written agreement with the INPT that in case the alliance attains majority, the chief minister will be chosen from the party bagging the bigger number of seats. Such an agreement with extremist killers shows the power-hungry Congress party’s abysmal degradation.

Mr Aiyar further says the INPT has no connection with the NLFT. A classic piece of humour! Hrangkhawl signed a ‘memorandum’ on August 12, 1988 in presence of Rajiv Gandhi and brought overground a section of the TNV, at the same time keeping another section underground. This very section was named NLFT. It was with this very NLFT’s guns that the IPFT (renamed INPT later) of Hrangkhawl and his peers usurped the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council (ADC) a vital body. The NLFT carried out an unprecedented terror campaign in April-May 2000. The Congress was one of its accomplices.

In August 2001, three ADC executive members --- Benoy Debbarma, Mulukchand Debbarma and Krishna Kanta Jamatia --- brought to the ADC headquarters in Khumulawng 63 tribal students from different colleges, including Tripura Engineering College. Later they packed those students to NLFT camps in Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh for arms training. The security forces caught 7 of them when, after a month of arms training, they were on their way back. Some of them confessed the fact before the police and a judicial magistrate. On this basis, the police filed a chargesheet in Amarpur SDJM court against some people, including the three INPT executive members, under relevant acts.

In course of their factional feuds, some NLFT extremists kidnapped Sridam Debbarma (INPT), in charge of the ADC’s education department. After keeping him in their Bangladesh camp for a few months, they released him in September. Sridam deposed before the police that it was Debabrata Kalai, an INPT leader and former ADC chief executive member, who had got him kidnapped.

Surprisingly, INPT members in the ADC and assembly leave their official securitymen behind before they go for their clandestine meetings with NLFT militants. The police have registered some cases on the basis of statements by such securitymen. And yet Mr Aiyar glibly certifies from his cozy corner in Delhi that the INPT has nothing to do with the NLFT!

Far from running a whispering campaign, the CPI(M) vigorously proclaims at every public meeting that the INPT is a mask of the extremist NLFT.

Mr Aiyar also says: while the Congress-INPT leaders are fighting against the extremists, CPI(M) ministers cannot move outside their security circles. Common people would ask in wonder: how come Congress-INPT leaders roam unscathed in jungles and remote areas without any security, and the extremists never touch them?

Let Mr Aiyar note: Above 80 per cent of the people killed by extremists over the last two decades were leaders and activists of the CPI(M) and Ganamukti Parishad; the rest being common people or officers and jawans of security forces. Extremists have killed many of the CPI(M), including minister Bimal Sinha, legislators and ADC members. But nobody is to date aware of a single incident of any Congress leader or activist being killed by extremists. Does Mr Aiyar want the CPI(M) ministers to oblige him by moving without security and getting killed?

ANOTHER WHITE LIE

Mr Aiyar further says: the CPI(M) has a nexus with the All Tripura Tiger Force. He is expected to substantiate this statement with proof, if he has. The CPI(M) has been in the forefront of fight against separatists in Tripura, Assam, Bengal, Punjab, Jammu & Kashmir. Hundreds of CPI(M) activists have been murdered by the extremists sponsored by imperialism and other vested interests including the Congress. Even ATTF extremists have killed CPI(M) activists. ATTF extremists kidnapped a CPI(M) legislator, Pranab Debbarma, and held him in their Bangladesh camp for 11 long months. He somehow escaped from their clutch and returned with the help of Bangladesh police. The CPI(M)’s battle against extremism has been uncompromising. No amount of falsehood resorted to by Mr Aiyar can tarnish its bright image.

Another white lie is Mr Aiyar’s allegation that Tripura education minister Anil Sarkar has asked the Bengalis to take up arms against the tribals. Mr Aiyar even put this veteran CPI(M) leader at a par with infamous VHP leaders. Why? Because Sarkar called upon all peace-loving people, Bengalis as well as tribals, to build resistance against the extremists as everyone has a right to self-defence. While the CPI(M) is protecting ethnic unity in Tripura, it is the Congress that is out to break it.

Contrary to Mr Aiyar’s statement that the CPI(M) depends on special police officers (SPOs), the fact is that it depends on people’s power. The Congress-INPT combine is running a motivated propaganda campaign. As the central government has endangered public security by withdrawing the army from Tripura and is refusing to dispatch security forces as per the state’s requirement, the Left Front government has appointed some SPOs to assist the police in combating the extremists. These SPOs are controlled by the police, as in Punjub, J&K and Karnataka. And these very SPOs are an eyesore to Mr Aiyar!

PEOPLE REMEMBER THAT JUNGLE RULE

Now the claim that the people of Tripura want to bring the Congress-extremist combine to power. But people do remember the Congress-TUJS jungle rule of 1988-92 when Congress goons butchered hundreds of people. When CPI(M) men were to hoist the flag at party office in Birchandramanu, these goons killed 11 of them and 2 securitymen. An attempt was made to burn alive 82 CPI(M) activists, including the present chief minister Manik Sarkar, inside the CPI(M) office at Bat-Tala in Agartala. More than 200 offices of the CPI(M) and mass organisations were ransacked and captured. Frequent cases of rape made even Congress supporters send their female members to Kolkata. The people of Tripura will be the last persons to let such a jungle rule return.

The people here are with the CPI(M)-led Left Front and made it win each and every election to the parliament, the panchayats and municipal bodies, besides the assembly elections. Its latest victory was in the West Tripura parliamentary bypoll, held on February 22 this year. The Congress aligned with the extremists in that election too. But the Left Front candidate won, leading in 27 out of the 30 assembly segments. None would object if Mr Aiyar likes to wallow in daydreams.

As for alliance with extremists, Congress leaders have not learnt any lessons from the past. Mr Aiyar’s friend, Rajiv Gandhi, once certified a separatist guru, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale of Punjab, as a saint. But it was this ‘saint’ who transformed the Amritsar Golden Temple complex into an arsenal. The rest is history. Rajiv lent support to separatist LTTE ultras of Sri Lanka, and the same LTTE killed him. Will Mr Aiyar, a bureaucrat-turned-politician, learn a lesson from such blunders? Mr Aiyar, who lacks courage to fight an election in his own state, is fond of addressing stage-managed meetings. Naturally he felt overwhelmed when he got a chance to address the Congress-INPT’s September 8 rally in Agartala, of only a few thousand souls, organised at the expense of a big sum. But it was at the same rally that Hrangkhawl said: “The Congress will have to swallow many things.” Allying with such very extremists, the Congress is obviously playing with fire, and cannot but suffer tragic consequences.