DA Editorial | Sara Debbarma
Tripura’s Leader of Opposition, Jitendra Chaudhury, has accused the ruling BJP of delaying Village Committee elections in the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council for nearly a decade, alleging that the polls now underway were only scheduled after the Supreme Court directed the State Election Commission to conduct them. Speaking at Left Front campaign meetings in Sabroom subdivision, Chaudhury went further, declaring that the ruling party had “no right to seek votes” given the circumstances under which the elections finally arrived.
The underlying timeline is not seriously in dispute. Village Committee elections in the TTAADC had indeed remained pending for years, and it was judicial intervention that ultimately set September 2026 as the date these polls would finally be held. Whatever the reasons behind that delay, the basic sequence — years without elected Village Committees, followed by a court-ordered schedule — is a matter of record, not interpretation. That alone makes this a legitimate line of political attack, and voters in the TTAADC are entitled to weigh it as they decide how to cast their ballots.
What deserves more scrutiny is the leap from “elections were delayed” to “the delay was deliberate obstruction.” A decade is a long time, and Tripura’s tribal council elections have moved through changes in state government, shifts in the composition of the TTAADC’s political landscape, and — during parts of this period — genuine administrative and legal complications that are common to India’s electoral machinery more broadly. Some of that decade predates the BJP’s current tenure in Tripura altogether. A fair accounting of why these elections took as long as they did would need to examine each stretch of that period on its own terms, not treat the entire decade as a single, uninterrupted act of one party’s obstruction.
That said, the burden of explanation genuinely falls on the government here, not on its critics. When elections central to grassroots democracy in tribal areas are delayed for years and only proceed once a court orders it, the natural and reasonable public question is why the state’s own machinery did not act sooner on its own initiative. “The Supreme Court made us do it” is not, on its own, a reassuring answer — it is, at best, an admission that voluntary compliance with the constitutional expectation of timely elections was not forthcoming until compelled.
Tripura’s opposition parties have every right to make this case loudly during the campaign, and the BJP has every right to respond with its own account of the delay’s causes. What voters deserve, beyond the political theatre of the moment, is a genuine, documented explanation — from the state government, the Election Commission, or both — of exactly what happened in each stretch of that decade-long gap. Village Committees are the level of governance closest to tribal communities’ daily lives; a decade without them is not a footnote in Tripura’s democratic history; it is a chapter that deserves a fuller account than a campaign-trail exchange of accusations can provide.