Book Description

Over the last three decades, Tripura, the smallest of North East Indian states surrounded on three sides by Bangladesh, was caught in the vortex of highly patterned militant violence, deadly ethnic conflicts, and planned destruction of thousand year old harmonious and peaceful coexistence of tribal and non-tribal people of the state. Since the day the TNV took to arms, the surfeit of tribal insurgencies in Tripura is marked by brutal civilian massacres, abduction of innocent citizens, ambushes on security forces, large scale extortions and a ruthless ethnic cleansing perpetrated on unarmed non-tribals by the National Liberation Front of Tripura and the All Tripura Tiger Force-two banned underground organizations.The armed insurrections in Tripura at varied levels and colors - often abetted by narrow political interest - were marked not only by serious threat to human life and civilian security, but also by destruction of properties on a colossal scale. The blood spilling xenophobic tribal militancy sough homogenization of the land, and the subsequent fall out also caused wide ethnic fissures between the majority Bengalis and minority indigenous tribal people. One of the important features of the orgy of violent campaigns was that it had taken ominous proportions, with the forces inimical to India coming to play the key role to help and support the underground elements. The book 'The Eyewitness-Tales from Tripura's Ethnic Conflict', creates a matrix of hard facts and figures with personal experiences and stories of witnesses from a cross section of people-common men, police and security officials, administrators, militants, journalists, businessmen, victims of militancy, et al. The book records in cold letters, and with appropriate interpretations, the painful litany of grisly crimes in the name of insurgency and how and why these happened. ILLUSTRATIONS 16 b/w photographs