Mamata Banerjee In Closed Door Session

With Tripura Extremist Group

B Prasant

OVER the weekend of February 7-8, Trinamul Congress chief Mamata Banerjee sat down for two extended sessions of talks with a six-member delegation of the National Liberation Front of Tripura (NLFT), led by Bijoy Hrangkhwl, the well-known extremist and separatist leader, whose group has been responsible for running a series of murderous armed assaults on the CPI(M) and the Left Front cadres in Tripura in the past.

Speaking to the media at Agartala in Tripura, Hrangkhwl freely admitted to the TMC-NLFT talks and said in an unambiguous tone that the Indigenous Nationalist Party of Tripura (INPT), the political wing of the NLFT, “was ready to be a part of the NDA courtesy of Mamata Banerjee.”  Hrangkhwl also said that the talks he had had with Mamata Banerjee over seat adjustments in Tripura for the Lok Sabha polls, were “rather more successful” than that he had had with the Bengal and Tripura units of the Indian National Congress.

It is learnt that history-sheeters like N C Debbarma, Barindra Debbarma, Animesh Debbarma, Nagendra Jamatia, and Rajweswar Jamatia were in the delegation that met and spoke with Mamata Banerjee.

The vicious Hrangkhwl who was at one time the supremo of the violent extremist and separatist group, the Tripura National Volunteers or the TNV, leads the NLFT and the INPT from the front.  He was the principal moving force behind the terrible rioting of 1980 and the subsequent murderous attacks on the non-tribal people of Tripura, targeting especially both the tribal and the non-tribal workers of the CPI(M).

With the resounding electoral reverse of the INPT-Congress combine in the last assembly elections in Tripura, the INPT as well as the NLFT face a vertical if ragged split down the middle.  In 2001, Mamata Banerjee had got into a huddle with another extremist and separatist outfit, the Kamtapuri People’s Party (KPP) that had openly claimed responsibility for the murder of a number of CPI(M) workers of north Bengal over the past. 

Following the complete backfiring of the TMC-KPP alliance in the 2001 assembly polls in Bengal, Mamata Banerjee has now plumped for another attempt at aligning herself with another, more brutal and inhuman, extremist group.  “There is no doubt that the people of Tripura will once again give this opportunist and an anti-people alliance a sound drubbing,” commented state secretary of the CPI(M), Anil Biswas.

In the meanwhile, a lot of wheeling and dealing has commenced in the ranks of the Trinamul Congress following the disinclination of the “supremo” to allot the Kolkata northwest seat to Sudip Bandyopadhyay allegedly for his proximity to Vajpayee-Pramod Mahajan group in the BJP central leadership. 

Bandyopadhyay has recently written two fawning letters to Banerjee asking for her forgiveness for all the sins he had committed by coming close to a section of the BJP leadership in Delhi and exhorting upon her to re-nominate him from the Kolkata northwest seat. Banerjee’s response was to nominate him as the candidate in Raigunj where he will have his once-friend-now-foe Priyaranjan Dasmunshi to contend with over and above the strong CPI(M) candidate.

The last that one learns about the sordid matter is that Mamata Banerjee has nominated Kolkata mayor, and once her mentor, Subrata Mukherjee from the Kolkata northwest seat with Sudip vowing to “retain the seat even if I have to fight as an Independent candidate.”