Bijoy Hrangkhawl

Agartala, Sept. 24: In a move pregnant with significant political ramifications, the Tripura government has registered a police case against Indigenous Nationalist Party of Tripura president Bijoy Kumar Hrangkhawl, two months after he delivered a controversial speech in Geneva.

Hrangkhawl — a former militant leader and now a legislator — had raised the hackles of the ruling Left Front government as well as other parties by questioning Tripura’s merger with the Indian Union on October 15, 1949 and calling insurgency in the state a “struggle for self-determination”. He had addressed the international convention of the Working Group of Indigenous Population in the Swiss city on July 22-26.

A sub-inspector of police last night registered a suo moto case in the West Agartala station under Section 157 of the IPC. Indicating that charges of sedition might be brought in against Hrangkhawl, the sources said provisions of 120(b), 153(a) and 153(b) of the IPC would also be invoked against the INPT president.

The ruling Left Front government had warned that appropriate action would be taken against the former rebel leader for his anti-national utterances in Geneva. The government, however, stopped short of clamping the National Security Act, which would have resulted in Hrangkhawl’s immediate arrest and cause a law and order flare-up.

PCC president Birajit Sinha described the case against Hrangkhawl as “politically-motivated by the Left Front”. The Opposition Congress is an ally of the INPT.

Hrangkhawl, who was first arrested in the aftermath of the June 1980 riots, was released at the behest of the then Left Front chief minister Nripen Chakraborty.

He had led a decade-long insurgent movement in the state until September 1988, when he surrendered after signing a peace accord. Having resumed normal political activity as a leader of the Tripura National Volunteers for many years, Hrangkhawl merged his party with the Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura last year, which later emerged as the INPT.

It was as president of the INPT that Hrangkhawl had visited Geneva. In his speech there, Hrangkhawl gave a “distorted” version of Tripura’s history, questioning the state’s very merger with the Indian Union. He also called the current phase of blood-splattered militancy as the struggle for self- determination.

However, Hrangkhawl tried to gloss over the contents of his speech, first at a news conference and then a mass rally.

Describing himself as a “fighter for the cause of indigenous people”, he reiterated his faith in the Tricolour and the Constitution, asserting that he was never a “separatist”.

Despite the turnaround, the ruling Left Front was preparing the ground for action. Highly-placed sources said: “He has been in league with the banned militants over the past years and on foreign soil, he made the seditious speech. So the case is a natural corollary.”

They said the government was not keen on “making a martyr out of Hrangkhawl but to show that nobody, however high or mighty, is above the law of the land”.