Five days before Tripura’s tribal council goes to the polls, a vehicle carrying BJP supporters was fired upon near Teliamura in Khowai district on Tuesday. No one was hurt, but a live small arms round was recovered from the spot. A case has been registered. Investigators are looking at whether political activists were involved in blocking the supporters from reaching a Chief Minister’s rally.
It is the sharpest incident yet in a campaign that has been escalating for weeks. But it did not arrive without warning.
Since the TTAADC elections were announced on March 17, at least 21 incidents of political violence have been recorded across Tripura — an average of roughly one per day, according to a senior state police official who spoke on condition of anonymity. The incidents range from clashes involving machetes, rods and sticks to vandalism of vehicles and party offices.
The day before the Teliamura firing, three BJP activists were injured in an attack at Sepahijala district; a suspect has since been arrested. Among those who faced the attack was Tripura’s education minister Kishore Barman. The week before that, three police personnel were injured when a BJP rally came under attack at Kamalpur in Dhalai district. The trail leads back to late March, when an accident near Santirbazaar in South Tripura became the first election-related clash of the cycle, shortly after polling was announced.
The TTAADC governs nearly 70 per cent of Tripura’s 10,491 sq. km territory, spread non-contiguously across the state’s hill districts. Deploying adequate security across that terrain is not straightforward. Tripura’s Director General of Police Anurag Dhyankhar has toured multiple districts, met with district police chiefs, and issued advisories on law and order management. The force on the ground includes Tripura Police, the Tripura State Rifles, and CRPF personnel. The elections are on April 12.
The alliance that made this possible — and then made it inevitable
The BJP and Tipra Motha did not arrive at this confrontation suddenly. They were governing partners.
Tipra Motha joined the BJP-led coalition in Tripura in 2024, having first swept the ADC elections in 2021 — winning 18 of 28 contested seats barely two months after the party was founded. The terms of the partnership were formalised in the Tiprasa Accord, signed in March 2024: a tripartite agreement between the central government, the Tripura state government, and Tipra Motha, promising redress on economic, land, linguistic and political rights for tribal communities.
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Two years later, that accord remains largely unimplemented. What followed was a slow accumulation of friction that the alliance could not absorb.
The first major crack appeared in July last year, when BJP activists were reportedly attacked at Khowai while listening to PM Modi’s Mann Ki Baat broadcast. More clashes followed in October at Dhalai district, during a 24-hour bandh that left vehicles torched, shops vandalised, and multiple civilians and security personnel injured. In November, a BJP party office was gutted in Khumulwng — the ADC’s administrative headquarters — and three individuals, identified by Tipra Motha as its own supporters, were injured. Violence broke out again across West Tripura, Khowai and South Tripura in the months that followed, including on the eve of a Prime Ministerial visit.
The alliance survived each episode, barely. Veteran Motha MLA Ranjit Debbarma declared in July that his party was “almost ready” to withdraw support to the government — then retracted under instruction from the party’s leadership, which acknowledged tribal frustration while stopping short of a formal break. The breaking point, when it came, was the ADC election itself: Tipra Motha demanded the Tiprasa Accord be honoured as a condition for an electoral alliance. Talks in Delhi ended without agreement. The parties filed candidates against each other in all 28 contested seats.
The campaign in the open
Chief Minister Dr. Manik Saha has not moderated his language as polling day approaches. At a rally in Duski, Khowai district, he warned: “There is no point trying to scare people. When people’s action starts, Tipra Motha won’t find anywhere to flee to.” In earlier addresses, he accused the tribal party of harbouring hooliganism and corruption while campaigning on a message of unity, and declared that BJP would govern the ADC alone after April 12 — after which, he predicted, Motha would cease to be a factor in tribal politics.
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BJP spokesperson Nabendu Bhattacharya has offered a particular explanation for the violence: that the activists behind it were originally CPIM workers who migrated to Tipra Motha after the Left lost the tribal council five years ago, bringing their political methods with them. “It’s the Communists who introduced political violence in Tripura,” he said. “The hooligans once sheltered by them are the ones trying to take law into their hands at the behest of Tipra Motha now.” Education minister Kishore Barman made the same argument. A BJP source also indicated that if the party wins the council, it plans to initiate inquiries into what it alleges is large-scale corruption in the ADC under Motha’s administration.
Pradyot Kishore, for his part, has run a campaign centred on what Tipra Motha says the ADC needs and has not received: direct central funding that bypasses the state government, land title rights for tribals within the ADC, enhanced political representation, and cultural protections including the right to use the Roman script for the Kokborok language. He has denied that his party is responsible for the violence, instead alleging that cash distribution in interior tribal villages by rival parties is the friction that is generating clashes. His message to supporters has been consistent: document wrongdoing on mobile phones rather than respond physically.
On BJP, he has maintained a distinction he has returned to repeatedly — that the party’s central leadership supports tribal development, while a section of Tripura’s state BJP leadership is actively working to undermine the Tiprasa Accord. It is a framing that leaves room for future alignment, even as his party contests every seat the BJP is contesting.
Tribal intellectual and writer Bikashrai Debbarma believes BJP enters these elections carrying a structural liability in the tribal belt: it is seen as culturally alien, its leadership having publicly backed the Devanagari script for Kokborok in a community where the Roman script carries deep identity significance. He expects Tipra Motha to retain power, with one or two fewer seats than its 2021 tally, and BJP to win eight or nine — with IPFT, BJP’s other tribal ally contesting independently, picking up the remainder. “The leaders who recently sided with BJP won their last elections riding on the Pradyot Kishore wave,” he said. “Discounting that factor, they wouldn’t pose much of a challenge.”
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Senior political analyst Sekhar Dutta reads the same election differently, with a longer horizon. He expects Tipra Motha to respond to competitive pressure by intensifying ethnic polarisation — and believes this may be the last ADC election in which the party remains a major force, regardless of the outcome. “Either way,” he said, “this ADC polls will be the last when Tipra Motha will remain a significant player.”
For the TTAADC — which holds 30 seats, two of them nominated by the Governor, with 26 of the 28 contested seats reserved for tribals — April 12 will settle something immediate. What it settles about the future of tribal politics in Tripura is less certain.
