Hangsha Kumar is currently the opposition leader of the 30-member Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council (TTAADC), which is considered as a mini-Legislative Assembly….reports Asian Lite News
In a major setback for the ruling BJP in Tripura, top tribal leader Hangsha Kumar Tripura on Tuesday joined the Tipraha Indigenous Progressive Regional Alliance, a major tribal-based opposition party.
Accompanied by around 6,500 tribals belonging to the BJP and its ally Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura (IPFT), Hangsha Kumar joined the TIPRA at a public rally held at Manikpur in northern Tripura.
TIPRA supremo and Tripura’s former royal scion Pradyot Bikram Manikya Deb Barman among others addressed the public gatherings attended by thousands of tribal men and women.
Hangsha Kumar is currently the opposition leader of the 30-member Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council (TTAADC), which is considered as a mini-Legislative Assembly. The BJP has nine members in the TTAADC, which was captured by the TIPRA in the April 6, 2021 elections.
When TIPRA captured the politically important TTAADC last year, it became the fourth big political force after the CPI-M led Left, the Congress and the BJP in Tripura leading a significant political development ahead of the 2023 assembly polls.
Constituted in 1985 under the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution, the TTAADC has jurisdiction over two-thirds of Tripura’s 10,491 square km area and is home to over 12,16,000 people, of which around 84 per cent are tribals.
The Opposition Congress had earlier demanded imposition of President’s rule in Tripura, claiming “Super Jungle Raj” is prevailing in the state.
AICC in-charge for Tripura, Nagaland, Sikkim Ajoy Kumar, and Tripura Congress leaders, while talking to the media in Delhi, also demanded probe into all attacks against Opposition party leaders and workers by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) workers in the last 5 years by a sitting High Court judge.
The Congress, for the first time, has demanded President’s rule in Tripura.
“The Prime minister should answer in the Lok Sabha why the political opponents in Tripura are being subjected to political violence by the BJP? On Saturday night, BJP workers attacked a Congress leader’s house in Jirana (in west Tripura) with a bulldozer,” Kumar said.
Congress leader Sudip Roy Barman, the lone party MLA in Tripura, quoting the statistics of Tripura police department said during the 52 months’ rule of the BJP, 604 murders, 678 rioting, 644 kidnapping and 1,778 cases of theft cases were reported.
He said: “BJP workers and party-backed anti social elements conducted life-threatening attacks on me seven times. State party president Birajit Sinha, former state party president Gopal Roy, former MLA Ashish Saha and scores of Congress leaders were attacked by the BJP activists several times as the ruling party is keen to eliminate all the top state Congress leaders.”
Barman, who quit the BJP earlier this year and was re-elected to the state assembly on the Congress ticket for sixth time in the June 23 by-polls, said that the law and order situation in Tripura is so dreadful that 165 important files from the state police headquarters and 450 files from the education department were stolen to “protect” the important BJP leaders and ministers.
AICC Secretary Szarita Laitphlang said that an extremely grave situation has been prevailing in Tripura that the people of India should be privy about.
“The systematic death of democracy taking place in the far northeast of India. Whenever any incident or attack took place against the opposition party workers, the police and the security personnel have become silent spectators to the violent show,” she said.
The Congress leader said that regular attacks on women continue as they are subjected to physical abuses.
