He has perhaps earned the right to criticise
Take a look at the income tax returns filed by candidates ahead of the Tripura legislative assembly election in 2013. Manik Sarkar was and is one of the poorest — he lives on a monthly salary of ~5,000, given to him by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) or CPI (M). He has no house of his own. What he earns as the chief minister, he gives to the party.
His predecessor as CM in a CPI(M)-led government, Nripen Chakrabarti, wasnodifferent. Inthe 1980s, visitors who went to see him had to sit on an up turned steel trunk — there was no sofa in his official residence and his washing was hung on a line in the adjoining room.
Tripura is not a rich state and such an example from the top does seem to help the CPI (M) win elections. Sarkar has been CM of the state since 1998.
Of all the Northeast states, Tripura is judged the least corrupt. Unlike West Bengal under the Left Front, where one had to be a party member to be allowed to file a case in the local police station or else be accompanied by a member of the party to the station. In Tripura, the government does rule. That is evident everywhere, but most of all in the remarkable way the tiny state has beaten back insurgency.
Tripura’s once-tribal majority underwent a sea change with unhindered migration from the former East Bengal and subsequently from Bangladesh. The tribals were pushed to the hills, and the politics and administration in the state dominated by Bengali-speaking locals and migrants. Insurgency started as a protest movement against this disempowerment. The first organised-armed tribal movement, Sengkrak (clenched fist), originated in the mid-1960s after non-tribal refugees settled in the tribal reserve forest areas.
The Tripura Upajati Juba Samiti in 1971, followed by the Tripura National Volunteers in 1981, the National Liberation Front of Tripura in 1989 and its armed wing, the National Holy Army and All Tripura Tiger Force, in July 1990 came to dominate the political discourse. The last two contested the merger of the kingdom of Tripura with the Indian Union, demanded sovereignty for Tripura and deportation of “illegal migrants”.
High-handedness by central police forces and the army usually provides the spark for insurgency, which feeds on economic deprivation and becomes an alternative discourse. In Tripura, Sarkar couldn’t dramatically alter the standard of living of the people because the tiny landlocked state attracted no industry, investment or development. But, what he did was to get rubber planted on a maniacal scale. It takes about five years for a rubber plantation to begin yielding latex. When it does, an acre can get you an income amounting to ~1 lakh a year. Even on the smallest landholding, ~8,000 to ~9,000 a month was enough to sustain a small family. To ensure the commodity could be marketed, he encouraged the formation of self-help groups. There are about 35,000 of these, with 10 members each. To be sure, unemployment levels are still high but that is because there is no industry.
Because the paramilitary forces were kept in leash, Tripura has seen next to no human rights violation by police forces. So, trite as it may sound, law and order, combined with development, has yielded results in curbing insurgency. When you study Tripura, you realise how easy it can be.
With India normalising relations with Bangladesh, Tripura has gained the most. It has untapped reservoirs of natural gas and, if the East-West corridor can go through Tripura, the state can become a gateway to Southeast Asia. A big bonus would be a transit passage through Bangladesh, which has an 865-km border with Tripura.
D N Sahay, a policeman who was once governor of the state, says the rest of India needs to learn how to control insurgency from Tripura. He also says communist Tripura can never become communist West Bengal. Sarkar himself said in 2013: “The electorate of West Bengal punished the Left Front government for its weaknesses and wrongdoing.”
Against this background, consider his Independence Day speech which Doordarshan and radio wouldn’t send out. Only Manik Sarkar, who gets a salary of ~9,200 a month as CM and donates it all to the party, could have delivered it. Ahead of the 2013 Assembly election, he had ~1,080 cash in hand and his bank balance stood at ~9,720.