‘Look at the fellow, those are the eyes of a killer,’ snarled the officer. I stared at him, appalled. Around me, most of the journalists, largely Bengali Hindus, were hanging on to every word, taking down his remarks as if they were divine incantations. Photographers jostled each other to take pictures. The next day, one of the manacled men, identified as Bijoy Hrangkhawl (which he certainly was not) appeared in a Tripura newspaper, his eyes stony as they stared expressionlessly at the camera.

No one bothered to ask them any questions. Neither, I regret to say, did I—although I did the ask army officer the basis for making the accusations. He said that the captured men had been tracked from the nearby jungles where they were hiding. They had since been identified by local villagers as having been involved in the mayhem. But surely, at night, when everyone is fleeing for their own lives, you don’t have much time to identity your attackers, especially in the cover of darkness.

A couple of days later, Suzoy and I were returning in our car to Agartala. It was late in the afternoon, we hadn’t eaten since morning and were quite hungry. But I had one more interview to conduct at the main army office before we could head for food. There was another army major here, extremely cordial who received us at the mess and asked us to have lunch.

I demurred.

‘Have you eaten? If you haven’t’, then why not?’

We sat down to a quick meal, tossing questions about the situation and casualties at the officer. ‘You can’t name me as a source,’ he said, ‘But our figures are that not less than 1,000 people have died.’

Of course, the octogenerarian Chief Minister, Nripen Chakraborty, a veteran Marxist, stuck to a figure which was about half of the army estimate. Any challenges or queries were met with obstinacy and a flaring of temper. ‘If you know so much,’ he once snapped at me, ‘why don’t you tell me before you come to a press conference?’ ‘Are journalists to do the job of governments,’ I asked. He stiffened with anger.

Barely a month later, an official inquiry into the devastation remarked that while the official toll was placed at 550 (of which 69 were tribals), ‘according to the Chief Minister himself, over 1,800 are reported missing; many of them might be dead.’5

Eight years of intermittent clashes continued but the militants and their leaders were tiring. In 1988, a peace accord was signed between Hrangkhawl and New Delhi under which the TNV agreed to disarm its cadres, accept the Indian Constitution, review the problems of alienation of tribal lands and prevent further alienation, create development centres, and generate jobs for tribal young men and women.