Agartala, April 16: He is the “son of a coronated king”, to say the least, but in Bangladesh, he is known only as chief of his tribal subjects, the Chakmas.

A successful lawyer in the Bangladesh supreme court, 39-year-old Raja Debasish Roy feels in a modern democracy the title of a king is redundant.

The strapping raja was here as the special guest for the three-day “Bijhu” (new year) festival of the Chakma tribe of Tripura.

He took part in the traditional festivities in the remote Jharjharia village under Natun Bazar police station of South Tripura.

Before returning to Bangladesh, he carefully chose his words while replying to the numerous queries from newspersons.

“Before my birth, our ancestral royal palace at Rangamati in the Chittagong Hill Tracts had been submerged by the surging water of the Kaptaidamand lake built by the government of Pakistan on the river Karnaphuli in the late 50s,” he said.

During the freedom struggle of Bangladesh in 1971, his father, Raja Tridib Roy had joined hands with Pakistan, ostensibly to save his tribal subjects from persecution by the rampaging Pakistani army.

Later, Raja Tridib Roy, separated by politics and geography from his son and wife Binita Roy, a granddaughter of Brahmo Samaj leader Keshav Chandra Sen, was rewarded with ambassadorial assignments by the successive governments of Pakistan. He cited the denial of citizenship and visa as the reason for his father’s inability to visit and settle in Bangladesh, though his mother, Binita Roy, is still with him.

However, Raja Debasish Roy had the best of education, ending up as a Bar-at-law from England. He also studied in Australia. The raja has a booming practice in the supreme court.