IPFT General Secretary Swapan Debbarma was allegedly assaulted at Hezamara on Tuesday while travelling toward Khowai district on Village Committee election business, with supporters of TIPRA Motha named as those allegedly involved. IPFT minister Shukla Charan Noatia called it a “brutal attack” and warned that such acts “directly undermine the very spirit of our unity,” appealing to workers across all three ruling alliance parties to exercise restraint. The appeal itself is the tell. This is not violence between rival camps contesting an election against each other. IPFT, TIPRA Motha and the BJP are, on paper, running as a single formation in the September 28 Village Committee polls. An alliance whose own coordinating minister has to publicly plead with allied workers not to assault each other has a cohesion problem no seat-sharing formula resolves.
This week’s incident does not stand alone, and treating it as an isolated flare-up would understate the pattern. Almost exactly a year earlier, on September 20, 2025, TIPRA Motha supporters attacked BJP Janajati Morcha vice-president Mangal Debbarma and three others at the same location, Hezamara, during a planned pachra-distribution event. That clash was followed weeks later by the October 23 bandh violence — a strike originally organized around grievances tied to the Tripura Accord’s slow implementation, during which a six-wheeler truck was burned in Dhalai district and shops were vandalized in Khowai. IPFT extended moral support to that bandh even then, despite its formal alliance with the BJP, in what The Wire at the time described as evidence of “growing discontent within the coalition.” Hezamara, in other words, has functioned as a recurring flashpoint for this alliance’s internal tensions for at least a full year before this week’s assault.
There’s also a live political rift running in parallel to the physical violence. Chief Minister Manik Saha’s recent remarks opposing Roman script adoption for the Kokborok language drew condemnation from both TIPRA Motha and, shortly after, from Swapan Debbarma himself — the same IPFT leader now allegedly assaulted by TIPRA Motha supporters this week. Debbarma had publicly accused Saha of lacking understanding of “the historic Kokborok movement,” tracing the script demand back to 1967. That a senior figure in one allied party was recently in open, sharp disagreement with the alliance’s own Chief Minister, and is now allegedly a victim of violence from workers of a second allied party, illustrates just how many fault lines run beneath this coalition’s public unity messaging.
What makes the arrangement’s fragility more striking is that TIPRA Motha’s own founder has been unusually candid about the sacrifice this alliance represents. Pradyot Kishore Debbarma said in a Facebook Live address that his party could likely have won more than 500 Village Committee seats contesting independently, but chose the alliance anyway because implementing the Tripura Accord and securing Tiprasa rights mattered more than his party’s immediate electoral prospects — a striking admission that this coalition is being held together primarily by a bet on future accord implementation, not by any deep organizational trust between the three parties’ grassroots workers. Opposition Congress leader Sudip Roy Barman has already characterized the alliance as an attempt to “fool” Tripura’s indigenous people, and questioned what he called the “political rationale behind the repeated shifts” — a charge that gains more force each time alliance workers turn on each other rather than on the opposition they’re nominally contesting these elections against.
None of this necessarily means the alliance collapses before September 28. Every incident so far has been followed by swift condemnation and appeals for restraint from senior leadership on the affected side, and none has yet triggered a formal alliance rupture despite Debbarma’s repeated public threats over the past two years to walk away. That pattern of friction-followed-by-reconciliation may simply be how this particular coalition of convenience operates under strain. But dailyArchives readers, and TTAADC’s tribal voters heading to the polls this month, deserve to see this week’s assault in its full context rather than as a one-off aberration: an alliance whose leader admits he’s sacrificing hundreds of potential seats to hold it together, whose senior figures have publicly clashed with the state’s own Chief Minister within the past few months, and whose workers have now assaulted each other at the same location twice within a year. Political violence between coalition partners a week before a nomination deadline isn’t a footnote to this alliance’s story. Given how often it has recurred, it may be closer to the actual story.
DA Editorial Desk (Dhruba Deka)