Tripura Congress demands white paper on surrender of NLFT and ATTF

AGARTALA: The Tripura Pradesh Congress on Friday demanded a white paper from the state government regarding the recent peace agreement followed by mass surrender of NLFT and ATTF cadres, along with detailed information.
The party state president Ashish Kumar Saha asked the government to announce a package for the victims of insurgency including killing and displacement due to insurgent activities in two decades till 2007.
"After the BJP formed the government in 2018 then chief inister Biplab Kumar Deb had claimed he eradicated the insurgency in Tripura by multiple efforts and in last six years BJP leaders and ministers re-sounded the claim but suddenly, last month a peace agreement was signed by central and state governments with NLFT and ATTF in Delhi and a large number of their cadres surrendered,” Ashish stated.
Even during the campaign of last year’s assembly elections Chief Minister Dr Manik Saha acknowledged that BJP government was able to eradicate insurgency in Tripura. The Prime Minister and Union Home Minister had also campaigned for the success of ending insurgency in the state by the double engine government of BJP, Saha underlined.
Saha pointed out that, over a decade, Tripura had not witnessed insurgency activities and state police and BSF on a number of occasions referred to the eradication of insurgency in Tripura over past 10 years. However, all of a sudden, 584 cadres of NLFT and ATTF surrendered, which raised the question of their identity.
"The number of arms deposited was far less than the number of individuals who surrendered. No one knows what kind of insurgency activities they were involved in, but a massive package was announced for the surrendered cadres while no package for the victims of insurgency,” Saha pointed out.
He however, maintained that more than 300 people including security force personnel were killed, few hundred had been kidnapped and many of them were killed even after paying huge ransom, thousands of families displaced, or lost their livelihoods due to insurgency.
“The insurgents who were accused of large scale murder, mayhem and extortion should have been in jail and supposed to be under judicial trial; instead Tripura government accumulated these defunct cadres and provided handsome packages and other benefits – we want a whitepaper on it,” Saha added.