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PEACE, POWER, PROXIMITY : TRIPURA’s THREE SELLING POINTS
Subir Bhaumik Former BBC Correspondent
PEACE, POWER, PROXIMITY : TRIPURA’s THREE SELLING POINTS
PHOTO : Ashuganj Port and Transport route to Tripura. TIWN

Attracting investments from domestic and global capital involves some real solid hard sell for any state in a country like India, since Manmohan Singh’s mantra of liberalization and globalization. The states are involved in cut throat competition amongst themselves, specially when you have few chiefs ministers like Narendra Modi who will do anything it takes .

One would imagine whether small and remote states like Tripura will ever stand a chance in India’s investment bazaar. If contemporary experience is any indication, the answere would be a big ”no”. Ask a captain of Indian industry and he might say Tripura where. If he is better in geography , it is likely he will say forget it. Your state is far off in one corner of northeast India , it has no industrial history or base, no big deposit of minerals – this is what a Tata or an Ambani is likely to say if they found an industry minister like Jitendra Chaudhury at their doorstep . And the color of Chaudhury’s party won’t make things easy – red in politics hardly inspires big business , after Bengal’s long years of militant trade unionism that former chief minister Buddhadev Bhattacharya  tried to control with his somewhat capital-friendly ‘do it now’ approach.

But times are changing and so is the geopolitics of Asia, bringing for remote states like Tripura a sudden ray of hope in the horizon.  India’s northeast, specially its relative peaceful lower reaches, will fall right in the middle of the proposed BCIM (Bangladesh-China-India-Myanmar) economic corridor . That is where lies Tripura. The state also sits , literally so, within Bangladesh, encircled by India’s eastern neighbor on three sides. From Agartala, Bangladesh’s capital Dhaka, port city Chittagong and tea and gas -rich region of Sylhet is all three hours journey by road or rail.  Bangladesh is not merely a key player in BCIM but also in BIMSTEC ( full form : Bay of Bengal Initiative for Multi Sectoral Cooperation) , whose permanent headquarter is soon to be located in Dhaka.  Most importantly, if Modi manages to implement  the Teesta and Land boundary deals, there is a strong chance Bangladesh will provide India transit rights to Northeast India and allow the region right of use of the port of Chittagong – and perhaps the deep sea port of Sonadia, when it is finally constructed by the Chinese.  If that happens, India’s entry to Northeast will no longer be the ‘Chicken Neck” through the North Bengal-Western Assam  corridor  but through the Chittagong-Asuganj sea to land corridor.

Indian big business will prefer accessing Northeast India through this sea to land corridor from Chittagong to Agartala via Asuganj (river port)  and Akhaura (land port) rather than having to go through the circuitous insurgency-ravaged Alipurduar- Kokrajhar corridor , where ethnic conflicts often close down highways . Transit to India will be boon for Bangladesh providing the country a real good chance of checking the adverse balance of trade with India by boosting income from movement of Indian goods and people. Not only does India have a friendly regime in Dhaka now but one that is acutely conscious of the need for economic growth and as pragmatic as Narendra Modi’s government in Delhi could be. Such regimes can do business – and Bangladesh now has a professional army  unlike Pakistan which will not disturb its government’s efforts to develop relations with India. History also ensures that – the Bangladesh army took shape from the experience of the 1971 Liberation War which India supported and carried to its logical conclusion . And Agartala figures strongly in the narrative of Bangladesh’s emergence – without the Agartala Conspiracy case, Mujibur Rahman may never have become Bangabandhu. Tripura’s special relations with Bangladesh became evident when Hasina’s government allowed it bring all the heavy equipment for the 700 MW Palatana power project through the Chittagong Asuganj corridor.

That project and few others based on Tripura’s relative abundant natural gas deposits makes the state a power surplus state.  That gives us one P for hardsell. The other P is peace. Manik Sarkar;s government never talked big like L K Advani did  about launching punitive excursions in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir. But the state police under its former chief G M Srivastava  managed to actually conduct scores of covert operations against rebel bases and hideouts in Bangladesh when it was ruled by Khaleda Zia , using disgruntled rebel factions that gave such operations the look of a factional feud and not a planned official trans-border foray. These covert operations coupled with the strong ‘area domination’ of Tripura State Rifles (TSR) smashed the rebel groups that had unleashed a reign of terror and torture, death and destruction in Tripura for close to two decades. The CPI(M) ‘s stellar electoral performance in Tripura owes much to Sarkar’s success in bringing back peace by crushing the insurgencies as no other state in Northeast has ever managed to do. So we have peace and power, the two Ps that industry would love to have when they consider investments.

But what is the third P – it is proximity.

Proximity ! But is Tripura not a remote state. Yes indeed it is but geography is much the way you look at it and often is impacted by politics and economics. It has been a remote state all these years since Partition, but if Bangladesh allows transit and use of its ports to India, Tripura will be the gateway to Northeast, not Assam.  And its location on the BCIM economic corridor  and its proximity to Bangladesh markets as well as those in other Northeastern states makes an ideal investment destination for big Indian or foreign capital. If one calculates the Myanmar and western Chinese markets that the Kolkata Kunming highway passing north of Tripura is likely to open up , this is the place to be. Southern Assam, Mizoram or Manipur could all be close to the BCIM corridor or be located right on it – but unlike Tripura, they don’t enjoy the peace we have or the surplus power we will soon have. Even investors keen to invest in Bangladesh to use its Least Developed  Country (LDC) status  may find Tripura’s border region a safer and a better place to set up its manufacturing for the peace and power situation and then bring and rebrand the products in Bangladesh for exports.

All that Tripura now needs is a government that will be as aggressive in investment hard sell as it was in fighting insurgency. It needs a political leadership that cannot merely ensure stability but knows how to exploit it for attracting investments that will create jobs and bring in foreign exchange.Stability is no guarentee for politifcal acceptability -- what better example than West Bengal's Left government.  . 

(Mr. Subir Bhaumik is a veteran journalist, former BBC correspondant and author of  two well acclaimed books ‘Insurgent Crossfire’ and ‘Troubled Periphery’) 

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