Another Kejriwal in the North-East?

One is the product of the RTI and anti-corruption movements in the country while the other comes from a Congress background, his mother being a former minister of a state Congress government.

By Amitava Mukherjee

New Delhi: There are more dissimilarities than similarities between the two. One comes from a middle class background while the other is the scion of a royal family.

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One is the product of the RTI and anti-corruption movements in the country while the other comes from a Congress background, his mother being a former minister of a state Congress government. There are other kinds of differences also. While the one is aspiring for a national level stature, the other is content with picking up cudgels on behalf of his tribal group. But there is one stark similarity. Both Arvind Kejriwal and Pradyot Kishore Dev Burman have come out as nemesis for BJP’s electoral prospects. The former, till now, in Delhi and the surrounding region and the latter in Tripura.

Tripura will go to polls early next year and the BJP has high stakes in it.

The BJP has much to be afraid of Pradyot Kishore, a 44-year-old man, son of Kirit Bikram Kishore Dev Burman, the last King of Tripura and his wife Bibhu Kumari Devi. Bibhu Kumari was a fomer minister in the Congress government between 1989 and 1991 and later on became a Member of Parliament. Pradyot Dev Burman himself was President of the Tripura state congress. So his root is in the Congress although he is now speaking for the indigenous people of Tripura to whose stock he himself belongs.

But the BJP has a lot to fear about. Pradyot is a charismatic person and a certain amount of finesse. He could not bear with the rag-tag nature of the Tripura Congress and the party High Command’s apathy towards it. So he left Congress and in November, 2019 founded his Tipraha Indigenous Progressive Regional Alliance(TIPRA). First he tested waters and thus kept the TIPRA as a social organization for some time.

Then he gave it a political character and fought the election to the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council (TTAADC) winning 18 of the 28 seats thus handing out a crushing defeat to the BJP-Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura(IPFT) alliance.

This was the danger signal for the BJP as its own house in Tripura is in complete disarray. It had to replace Biplab Dev, the former chief minister, with Manik Saha for containing factional feuds. Now Saha is no heavyweight in Tripura politics and till now there is no sign that he has been able to wash away the bad blood.

Pitted against this internecine quarrels in the BJP is the fast expanding character of the TIPRA. The BJP is worried by the fact the indigenous tribals constitute one third of the total population of Tripura and two thirds of the total lands of the state belong to the TTAADC.

Is it because of this fact that Narendra Modi is worried? Otherwise why did he repeatedly harp on his government’s commitment to improve the lives of the Janjatiya communities during his tour of Tripura this month? To all intents and purposes BJP is shaky this time about its prospects in Tripura. That is why Modi tried to win over tribal minds by saying that the first choice of the tribal community is the BJP.
(The author is a senior journalist and commentator)