ELECTION 99
COLUMNISTS
DIARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
ELECTIONS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

Search Rediff

Don't ignore the trouble in Tripura

Thirty-seven years ago, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru made one of the most disgraceful speeches by any Indian prime minister. With the Chinese battering away at Assam, he made what can only be described as a farewell address to the Northeast. Mao's forces pulled back, but the people in the Northeast never forgot how easily a prime minister would give them up. It was then that the conviction began that nobody cared for the Northeast except in a crisis.

Has anything improved? Not really. Today nobody cares even when there is a crisis. For proof, look no farther than Tripura.

Tripura is ruled by neither the National Democratic Alliance nor by the Congress and its allies. Bihar, which makes the headlines with mind-numbing regularity, has the Congress in the Rabri Devi ministry, and Farooq Abdullah's National Conference is a member of the National Democratic Alliance. But Tripura is ruled by the CPI-M. The current chief minister, Manik Sarkar, is a mere stripling by Communist standards -- just 51. That also means he is free of some of the prejudices that blind his octogenarian colleagues in the politburo.

I referred to Rabri Devi and Farooq Abdullah earlier; let me now state that Manik Sarkar's Tripura combines some of the worst traits both of Bihar and of Jammu & Kashmir. There has been a general breakdown in the machinery of the state, and there has been a simultaneous rise in militant activity.

The situation has become so bad that the Consultative Committee of Planters' Associations met on 16 June to review the situation. Planters in the state recently submitted a memorandum to the visiting Union home secretary complaining of a "reign of terror" unleashed by militants. They were not exaggerating; there are three incidents of kidnapping reported every two days, a statistic gathered over three years. On a per capita basis, this makes Tripura the kidnapping capital of India.

The national media has ignored all this; however, it attracted the attention of the BBC, which interviewed Manik Sarkar. The chief minister stated in the midst of this conversation that the Baptists were abetting terrorist activities. Coming down to specifics, Sarkar claimed that a functionary of the church was found with gelatine sticks and other explosives.

It is close to two months since the BBC broadcast this interview. But the media as a whole chose to make just passing references to the whole issue. Even those newspapers that chose to publish Sarkar's allegations don't appear to have followed up the story. That is something which should have been done, if only to ensure that the generic word 'Christians' wasn't used; the Baptists -- strictly speaking, a small section of them -- don't speak for the whole community.

There is another interesting statistic. As I said, there are roughly 500 instances of kidnapping every year, but not a single victim has been a Christian. In other words, it is a deliberate attempt to scare the native Hindu population of the state. (For the record, all the figures were provided by the Government of Tripura.)

There is another disturbing fact. Planters may be the most visible victims, but they don't appear at the head of the priority list. It is, believe it or not, school teachers who head the category. This has led to the closure of several government schools, since the administration is in no position to provide protection to all the teachers, and they themselves don't have the money to hire guards as the planters do. Nobody is forcing children to attend schools run by missionaries, but do parents have an alternative if government institutions shut down?

The Marxists have, unofficially, come up with a tit-for-tat solution. They put pressure on Baptist schools to close their doors wherever a state-administered institution has been shut. I am not quite sure what to make of this 'eye-for-an-eye' attitude; what I do know is that this nonsense isn't doing any favours to the children of Tripura.

The Left has also revived the theory of the 'foreign hand'. They may be right. Intelligence agencies in Delhi have been tracking the flow of funds from the United States; the Baptists are amongst the largest recipients of such 'aid'. But there has been very little accounting for precisely what is done with this money. Delhi has other evidence as well, but this is something that shouldn't be revealed just now.

India paid heavily when Delhi ignored the looming crisis in Assam until the agitation suddenly exploded. I can only pray that in the preoccupation with a Bihar or a Kashmir, 'tiny' Tripura is not put on the backburner until it is too late.

T V R Shenoy