On September 28, voters across Tripura’s tribal-dominated areas will finally cast ballots for Village Committees under the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council — a local body election that, by law, should have happened five separate times in the years since it was last held. The last Village Committee elections took place in 2016. The committees’ five-year term expired on March 7, 2021. What followed was not an oversight correctable within a news cycle, but a genuine decade-long institutional vacuum, filled only after Tipra Motha’s Pradyot Kishore Manikya Deb Barma took the fight from the Tripura High Court to the Supreme Court, which ultimately ordered the state to hold the polls in a single phase and declared, pointedly, that no further extension would be granted. That a functioning democracy needed the country’s apex court to compel a state government to hold a legally mandated local election is, on its own, a story worth sitting with before getting to the election itself.
The scale of what was suspended for ten years is not small. These elections will fill 4,597 seats across 2,634 constituencies in 587 Village Committees — bodies that function as the tribal-area equivalent of gram panchayats elsewhere in India, responsible for sanitation, village infrastructure maintenance, and educational facilities at the most local level of governance. Nearly 9.62 lakh voters are eligible to participate, close to an even split between roughly 4.8 lakh women and 4.82 lakh men. For a decade, every one of those 587 committees operated without an elected mandate, meaning the tribal communities across TTAADC’s territory — the very areas where local infrastructure and basic services often need the most sustained attention — went without the elected local body legally designed to deliver exactly that oversight. As Tipra Motha’s own legislators argued in earlier court filings, development work in these village committees had virtually halted in the vacuum, even as Assembly, civic, and urban body elections proceeded elsewhere in the state during the same years.
That contrast deserves scrutiny rather than a passing mention. Tripura conducted state Assembly elections, urban body polls, and civic body elections through the very years its tribal village committees sat without a mandate. Whatever combination of administrative delay, security concerns, and political calculation produced that gap, the practical effect was that one specific tier of local democracy — the tier governing the state’s tribal-majority areas — was the one left waiting, while every other electoral calendar in the state moved forward on schedule. The Supreme Court’s own record of the case notes that security arrangements were repeatedly cited as a reason for delay, with the State Election Commission at one point requesting 136 companies of paramilitary forces when only 24 had previously been made available for a comparable District Council election. Genuine security logistics in a border state with international frontier areas requiring surveillance are not a trivial concern, and this newspaper has written elsewhere about the real strain those obligations place on Tripura’s security apparatus. But a security bottleneck that persists for ten years starts to look less like a logistics constraint and more like an institutional failure the state had limited urgency to resolve until a court forced its hand.
There is a genuinely hopeful reading of where this now stands, and it deserves equal weight. The State Election Commission has moved with real speed once the Supreme Court’s order landed: notification issued September 1, nominations closing September 8, polling scheduled for September 28, and counting set for October 5 — a compressed, single-phase timeline that avoids dragging security deployments and political tension out over months. Twenty-four companies of CRPF are currently deployed alongside TSR, state police, and roughly 18 companies of BSF focused on border security, suggesting the state has, at least for this cycle, resourced the security apparatus it previously said it lacked. That the TTAADC has been governed by Tipra Motha, a BJP ally, since 2021 adds a layer of political complexity — an alliance partner effectively suing the government it supports to force an election that will now test its own standing in the very territory it administers, a dynamic dailyArchives readers should watch closely as results are counted.
None of this undoes the decade lost. Two full electoral cycles’ worth of village committees, roughly 587 of them, operated without a democratic mandate while a legal remedy sat available and largely unused until the Supreme Court’s patience ran out. The election now proceeding is a genuine, welcome restoration of a constitutional right that TTAADC’s tribal residents were entitled to all along — not a favour granted, but an overdue correction to a failure of the ordinary electoral calendar. The real test for Tripura’s government going forward isn’t whether this election happens smoothly, though a peaceful, well-secured poll would itself be a meaningful achievement. It’s whether the next Village Committee term, due to expire five years from now, requires another decade and another Supreme Court order before the state remembers its own law.
DA Editorial Desk (Sara Debbarma)