New Delhi: Pradyot Kishore Debbarma, chief of the Tipraha Indigenous Progressive Regional Alliance, or the TIPRA Motha, said Sunday that his party would be willing to talk to the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) only if the latter provided an “honourable constitutional solution”.
Debbarma, whose 2-year-old party won 13 seats in the assembly elections held on 27 February and became the second-largest party in the 60-member assembly, was addressing speculation that he was in talks with the BJP.
“If you speak about a (sic) honourable constitutional solution we will speak! Otherwise, the tiprasa in me will never agree to the present format in Tripura. The indigenous people need their rights for survival and existence. My position is known to all from the very beginning,” Debbarma, scion of Tripura’s erstwhile royal family, wrote on his Facebook page Sunday,
He was responding to Assam Chief Minister and BJP leader Himanta Biswa Sarma’s statement that his party would be willing to talk to TIPRA Motha provided it dropped its demand for an independent Tipraland.
The BJP won 32 seats in the assembly while its ally, the Indigenous People’s Front of Tripura (IPFT), won one.
TIPRA Motha made a significant impact on these elections, not only cutting into the votes of the Congress and the Left combine but also eroding the BJP-IPFT’s vote bank.
Also Read: Had it not been for Debbarma’s TIPRA Motha, Congress-Left would have defeated BJP in Tripura
‘Cannot rule Tripura by excluding indigenous people’
In his statement, Sarma, who has led multiple rounds of negotiations with Debbarma, stated that the BJP and TIPRA Motha could resume talks only if the latter abandons its demands for a separate state.
“Tipra Motha has raised certain issues for the development of the tribal people. Without dividing the state of Tripura, we are ready to … talk to them and resolve the grievances of the tribal people. But we cannot talk about Greater Tripuraland,” Sarma had said Saturday.
Responding to this through a video message Sunday, Debbarma said: “We want to talk as well. We are sons of the soil. We are indigenous people. If you call me with honour, I will come. But if you call me to offer some kind of a post, no, I won’t. TIPRA Motha was not constituted for this. It was created for a constitutional solution. So my response is, if you call for a constitutional solution, we will talk face to face but you will have to give us respect”.
He added that he would only agree to the joint talks if his concerns are addressed.
“Whatever our constitutional rights are, of our land, our political rights, our economic rights, our language, our social rights, you will have to listen to that. I am not the TIPRA chief, I am an indigenous man first,” he said.
He also sought a “citizen-centric solution” in writing and demanded that his party should be “officially asked to come”, saying that as an “indigenous” person, he would not go to Delhi “asking for something that was theirs and was taken away” from them.
“Let them call me with dignity and honour and I shall come. Let them call us because we are the son of the soil and we have to be respected in our land. And if anyone wants to run Tripura by ignoring the indigenous population of Tripura, they will not find it very easy,” he said in the video.
(Edited by Uttara Ramaswamy)
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