DA Editorial Desk(Sara Debbarma)
On 28 September, voters across Tripura’s Sixth Schedule areas will go to the polls to elect Village Committees under the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council. On paper, this is grassroots democracy at its purest — the level of governance closest to the people, where roads, water points and local disputes get decided. In practice, the run-up to this election has raised a question that deserves the state’s honest attention: how competitive is competitive democracy, when more than a third of all seats are already settled before a single vote is cast?
The numbers are worth sitting with. Of the 4,597 seats up for election, 1,630 have already been decided unopposed following the withdrawal of nominations, with the Tipra Motha party alone securing 1,548 of them and its ally the BJP picking up another 82. That leaves 2,967 seats for actual polling on the 28th, contested by nearly 9,820 candidates. The State Election Commission has, for its part, described the atmosphere as peaceful, reporting no written complaints of obstruction during the nomination process, and noting that a handful of minor incidents were resolved promptly.
None of this suggests wrongdoing. Unopposed wins are a normal, legal feature of Indian elections, and a ruling alliance with deep organisational reach in tribal areas is entitled to the fruits of that reach. But an editorial’s job is not merely to record what is legal — it is to ask what is healthy for democratic life. When more than a third of seats in an autonomous council election are decided without a contest, the exercise loses something of its democratic texture, regardless of who benefits. Uncontested seats mean fewer voters engaging with the process, fewer candidates testing ideas in public, and less accountability built through the discipline of an actual campaign.
This is where Tripura’s opposition parties — the CPI(M), Congress, and others still in the fray for the remaining seats — carry a responsibility of their own. Democratic competitiveness is not something the ruling alliance owes the opposition; it is something the opposition must fight to sustain through organisation, candidate recruitment and grassroots presence. If large numbers of seats go uncontested year after year, the fault lies as much in absent competition as in any structural advantage enjoyed by the incumbent.
The State Election Commission’s assurance of a peaceful process is welcome and should be taken at face value. But peace and genuine contest are not the same thing, and Tripura’s newspapers, civil society and political class would do well to track not just whether polling on 28 September goes smoothly, but why so much of the battle was decided before it even began. Village Committees may be modest in scale, but they are the first rung of the ladder on which citizens learn what democracy feels like. That first rung deserves to be sturdy — and genuinely contested — everywhere it can be.