The proposed construction of a Ram temple in the place of a memorial of a tribal martyr, at Matai village in South Tripura district, is the newest controversy in Tripura. On October 14, the Vishwa Sanatan Sena, an organisation headed by important leaders of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the State, allegedly demolished the foundation stone of a memorial to be erected for Mohini Tripura, a tribal woman who was killed in police firing on March 17, 1967, during an agitation for tribal rights over forest land.
Mohini’s death caused an upheaval in the tribal community at that time and she became a symbol of tribal resistance and the movement for forest rights. The foundation stone for her memorial was laid by the Manik Sarkar-led government of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) in 2017 on the occasion of the 50th year of her martyrdom. “We believe that the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Forest Rights) Act, 2006, is a legacy of Mohini’s courage and sacrifice. We wanted to honour that sacrifice. We laid the foundation stone and set up a ‘memory preservation committee’. But there was some delay in preparing the papers for the land and the work on the memorial, so we thought we would finish everything after the Assembly polls [of 2018],” Tapas Datta, CPI(M)’s subdivisional secretary in the region told Frontline .
However, with the CPI(M) losing in the elections, the work on the memorial could not be completed. According to the party, on October 5, the BJP destroyed the memorial and nine days later the Vishwa Sanatan Sena laid the foundation stone for a Ram temple. The CPI(M) lodged complaints with the District Magistrate and withthe police in nearby Belonia town. “The entire region surrounding the land where we laid the foundation stone for the memorial has been developed in honour of Mohini Tripura. There is the Ma Mohini School nearby, barely 200 metres away from the memorial is the Ma Mohini Community Hall, and there is also the Ma Mohini Upa Swastha Kendra (health centre). They could have gone anywhere to build a Ram mandir, but they chose that spot deliberately to wipe out the memory of the martyr,” said Datta.
Not everybody within the BJP is comfortable with the issue, as winning tribal people’s support was crucial for its victory over the CPI(M) in the Assembly elections. A section of the party has also tried to establish that the Vishwa Sanatan Sena has nothing to do with the BJP. However, it cannot be denied that some of the most influential members of the BJP, including its State vice president, Subal Bhowmik, head the organisation. “The issue is a very sensitive one within the party, especially as the Sanatan Sena, though not a part of the BJP or even a wing of the party, is led by certain senior BJP leaders,” a State-level BJP leader said.
Subal Bhowmik, however, maintained that there was no controversy over the matter. “I myself laid foundation stone for the Ram mandir. This is a private property whose rightful owner was present at the time of the inauguration, and he had handed over to us the documents to use the land for building a temple. Earlier, the local MLA was former Finance Minister of the CPI(M) government, Badal Choudhury, under whose leadership this land was forcibly taken on the pretext of building a memorial for Mohini Tripura. The CPI(M) is now trying to make this into a national issue, but we will not be stopped from making a Ram mandir here,” Bhowmik told Frontline .
The CPI(M), on the other hand, insists that the plot had been given by its erstwhile owner, Haradhan Baidya, to construct a memorial for Mohini Tripura. “Although he gave us his consent to build the memorial there, we had not yet got the paper work done. We thought we would complete it later. However, Haradhan Baidya died. What the BJP is doing is just using its might to destroy everything. But we will continue to resist,” Badal Choudhury, who is a CPI(M) central committee member, told Frontline .
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