Tripura’s Chief Minister Moves Swiftly To Implement Poll Promises

Tripura’s new Chief Minister Biplab Deb has moved swiftly to implement the poll promises made by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to the people of the state.

He chaired the first cabinet meeting on Saturday, where it was decided to set up a committee to pave the way for implementation of the 7th Pay Commission recommendations for the 2.75 lakh state government employees and pensioners. This was a major poll plank of the BJP.

The cabinet also decided to request the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) to probe the murders of two journalists - Santanu Bhowmik and Sudip Dutta Bhowmik - which had rocked the state late last year. The CBI probes into the murders of the two journalists will also, hopefully, reveal the truth. The CPI(M) government had been accused of trying to hush up the murders.

The new government also decided to rename the Agartala airport after Maharaja Bir Bikram Kishore Debbarma, the last reigning king of the 738-year-old Manikya dynasty. This decision will go down very well with the tribals of Tripura, who constitute a little over 30 per cent of the state’s population. The tribals had always resented their being reduced to a minority in this erstwhile princely state due to large-scale influx of refugees, mostly Bengali Hindus, from East Bengal (and then East Pakistan, now Bangladesh) before and after partition.

The state saw a lot of bloodshed perpetrated by insurgent tribal outfits and the subsequent counter-insurgency operations. The decision to rename Agartala airport is expected to go a long way to make the tribals, who have been deprived all these decades by the Left government in Tripura, happy. The new government has also promised to accelerate development of the tribal areas.