It is barely a five-rupee rickshaw ride from near the border to Agartala. If you visit the official border post, you’re unlikely to see more than a handful of people waiting to get in, or to go across as customs and immigration officials check their papers. But barely a hundred metres behind the checkpost, people are coming and going as if this was nothing but a daily ritual. It is just that for those who come into Agartala, working as rickshaw-pullers, daily labourers, supplying cosmetics and electronic goods, even fish, or buying Indian goods for sale back home.

In fact, one of the biggest exports from the Indian side, on the black market of course, is medicine. Drugs of all sorts are in high demand in Bangladesh because of that country’s ban on major foreign medical formulations. Phensidyl, an Indian cough medicine, is a huge favourite. It is used more as an alcoholic stimulant rather than a cough syrup because of its high alcohol content.

Agartala, despite the fact that some of us from middle-class India look down upon it, is a magnet for people and business from Bangladesh.

Until 1998, Tripura was also a staging ground for an Indian-organized low level conflict conducted by Chakma tribal fighters against the Bangladesh Army. One need not go into details here on that; it has been described elsewhere.6

What is clear from all this is that the Bengali leaders of Tripura need to assure the tribal population of that state that they will accept some ground rules. if conditions are to improve. These include the honouring of existing land deals, not acquiring more land or interference in customary laws, acceptance of tribal control over the TTAC region and its neighbourhood. In turn, the militant groups must recognize that, at least in the next decades, there is no future in seeking separation from India. If their armed campaign continues, they will hurt Tripura and their own fellow tribals as well as Bengalis. Their long-term aims are ill-served by such shortsightedness. The Indian State is unlikely to be damaged overmuch by their attacks. They too must recognize the weariness with violence that has settled across the state as it has in other parts of the world.

One truth endures. As Hrangkhawl wrote to then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1983, and emphasized to me nearly ten years later, if the question of immigration is not resolved then ethnic violence will continue to lay waste to Tripura. How is this to be resolved becomes important as the problem is part of a larger picture that embraces much of the region, and affects India more than is generally acknowledged.

Chapter Twelve

The Story of Keramat Bhai