BackOutside In | Why Marxist leader Manik Sarkar wanted to meet Narendra Modi
Marxists want the fruits of economic development through the exploration of Tripura's abundant natural gas resources
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Some very interesting things are happening in a corner of India that is both strategically important and decidedly Marxist. Tripura, one of the eight North-Eastern states, is India’s only state that is ruled by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPM.
The state suddenly found itself in the eye of the national media during a visit to the region by Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The state’s Marxist chief minister Manik Sarkar—reputedly the country’s poorest chief minister—was said to have invited Modi to address his cabinet. This made the news because the Marxists are fierce foes of Modi’s right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
In actual fact, it appears, Sarkar asked for a meeting to discuss the issues facing his government and state. Now, the issues facing his state are also issues facing the entire North-East region, and the issues facing this volatile region are those that India is trying to overcome in talks with its neighbours, notably Bangladesh.
This (in short) is why:
All eight border-states are vital to India’s strategic interests in varying degrees. Two share borders with Myanmar, two with Bangladesh, one with Bhutan, one with Bangladesh and Myanmar, one with Nepal, China and Bhutan and one with China, Bhutan and Myanmar.
In all of the states, indigenous tribal populations are either in the majority or form a substantial minority. Given a history of injustice, discrimination, poverty and shameless meddling by some of India’s neighbours, China and Pakistan, the North-East has become synonymous with conflict—tribe vs tribe; tribe vs Bengali-speaking Hindu settlers; tribe vs the Indian Army.
Illegal immigration from Bangladesh worsens matters, although Modi has now begun the process of inking a land boundary agreement with Bangladesh that he hopes will bring down illegal immigration.
In the sub-continent’s volatile demographic politics, the role of Bangladesh becomes vital, when it comes to attempts to bring peace and prosperity to India’s North-Eastern states. It has never been an easy task. This corner of India is steeped in the history of the Cold War. In 1971, when Pakistan unleashed naked terror in its eastern territory, then called East Bengal and now Bangladesh, an estimated 10 million Hindu refugees fled to India.
Four Indian states—West Bengal, Tripura, Assam and Meghalaya—bore the brunt of this unprecedented human movement. “Against the total population of 15,56,822 (in Tripura), the number of refugees stood at 14,07,416," according to Refugees and the State: Practices of Asylum and Care in India, 1947-2000.
“Nothing is more clear, or more easily documented, than the systematic campaign of terror—and its genocidal consequences—launched by the Pakistani army…," the late American Senator Edward Kennedy wrote in a report after leading a fact-finding mission to Bangladesh and India. “All of this has been officially sanctioned, ordered and implemented under martial law from Islamabad. America’s heavy support of Islamabad is nothing short of complicity in the human and political tragedy of East Bengal."
In Tripura, tribal violence, fuelled also by a demand for secession, exploded in 1980 with a series of murderous attacks on Bengali settlers. The most infamous of these, attracting international media attention, took place in a village called Mandai. Perhaps because of the vague phonetic resemblance, it was quickly likened to the Mai Lai massacre of 1968, where US troops massacred unarmed civilians in Vietnam.
Up to 400 Hindus Bengalis were butchered in Mandai, and between 300 and 500 Vietnamese were killed in Mai Lai.
These killings in Tripura continued in two spells well into the noughties. Around 5,000-6,000 are thought to have died in the Tripura conflict but, unnoticed by large parts of India (which in any case doesn’t notice much of what goes on in these eight states), the Marxists of Tripura, working closely with successive central governments and the Army, managed to bring both the secession and the ethnic war under control.
Having brought peace, Tripura last year emerged as the most literate state in India, its literacy rate of 94.65% beating Kerala (93.91%). This feat was achieved through a focus on the state’s tribal population—so much so that scheduled castes and scheduled tribes in Tripura actually have a higher average literacy rate than the general population.
Alongside, the state raised a police force composed mainly of young tribals to deal with the conflict. “And they are very good," said Nilotpal Basu, a spokesman for the CPM.
Having accomplished all this, the Marxists now want the fruits of economic development through the exploration of Tripura’s abundant natural gas resources. They also want to link Tripura’s Ashuganj river port with the Chittagong port in Bangladesh. They want central help to turn Tripura into a centre of education for the region. And they want an international airport in the state capital, Agartala.
In short, the Marxist leaders of Tripura want much of what other states in India want. And that is why this week, when Modi visited the North-East, the Marxist chief minister of Tripura asked to meet the prime minister.
I asked Basu what he thought of the invitation row. “My party has issued a clarification," he said. “CM (chief minister) told PM (prime minister) that ‘let me and my cabinet colleagues explain the issues of the state’. That is all. There was a similar interaction some years ago with (former PM) Manmohan Singh also."
It is hard to imagine Tripura as the peaceful and literate place it obviously is now. Back in 1986, posted there briefly, I found reporting on the daily tribal vs settler conflict a depressing affair.
I find it hard to shake off images from a massacre. We dashed by road, taking hours, to find dead children among a family of five or six, their small bodies lying in large mud hut on a sunny day.
Fair play to the politicians of this northeastern corner, and may they find a fair ally in Modi.
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