After years of surreal courtroom battles, political negotiations and a Supreme Court mandate, the hills of Tripura are finally preparing to cast their village council votes after a decade. Polling for the 587 Village Committees will take place on September 28, with counting scheduled for October 5.
The last Village Committee election was held in 2016, when 7.68 lakh voters went to the polls across 587 committees and 4,597 seats.
Ten years later, the same 587 committees returned to the ballot, but to a very different electorate and an almost unrecognisable political landscape. This time, nearly 9.62 lakh voters will decide the fate of 4,597 seats across 2,634 constituencies.
A decade has passed. The Left has fallen from its commanding position, Tipra Motha has rewritten the politics of the hills, and the BJP has emerged as a formidable force.
The alliances are uncertain, the opposition is fragmented, and beneath the arithmetic of seats lies a much more difficult question: what exactly are the people of the hills voting for?
The Village Is Where the Battle Begins
The importance of these elections lies in what they may reveal about the next Assembly battle. Tripura has 20 ST-reserved seats, and whoever wants to rule Agartala cannot afford to lose the political pulse of the hills.
The last decade offers a telling lesson. In 2016, the Left Front swept the Village Committee elections, winning 520 of 587 committees. Yet two years later, that formidable grassroots dominance had collapsed.
The reason was not simply an anti-incumbency wave against the Left. Between those two elections, the IPFT successfully turned the Tipraland movement into an electoral force in 2017, capturing the indigenous imagination and, crucially, a large section of the tribal vote.
The lesson was profound: the political ground can shift before the ballot does.
In 2026, the question is once again about that ground. Tipra Motha has inherited and transformed much of the political space once occupied by the IPFT, while the BJP has become a force in the hills and the Left is fighting to recover what it lost.
The Village Committee election, therefore, is not merely about 587 local bodies. It is an early measure of who is capturing the imagination and the organisation of the tribal electorate before the next battle for the 20 Assembly seats.
Partners in Government, Rivals in the Hills
There is a lesson for the BJP in its decision to go largely alone in the TTAADC election earlier this year. The result reminded the party of a reality that the arithmetic of state power can sometimes obscure: the lotus has not yet taken root in the hills.
The BJP has undoubtedly expanded its footprint, but a large section of the tribal electorate remains sceptical of the party in ways that cannot simply be overcome by organisational expansion or state-level alliances.
That may explain the renewed urgency around its relationship with Tipra Motha. If the ADC election was a test of what the BJP could achieve on its own, the Village Committee election will test the limits of that strategy. This is where Thansa acquires its political significance.
Rooted in the Kokborok word for “united”, Thansa began as a call for Indigenous unity, a demand that the fragmented forces of Tripura’s indigenous politics coalesce around a single vision of Greater Tipraland, land rights and constitutional protection.
It was this language of unity that allowed the current Tipra Motha to draw together sections of the tribal electorate once divided between TIPRA, INPT, TSP and other smaller groups, and even to bring surrendered militant formations into a broader political framework.
The March 2, 2024 tripartite agreement with TIPRA, followed by the September 4, 2024 peace accord with surrendered militant groups such as the NLFT and ATTF, were the most consequential institutional expressions of that idea.
Together, they represented a political accommodation that brought a movement which had risen in opposition to the established order into an understanding with the very government it had once challenged.
For the BJP-led state government and the Centre, Thansa also offered a way to channel this united tribal assertion into a negotiated settlement within the existing constitutional framework. But two years on, the meaning of Thansa is being tested by more than electoral politics.
This September’s meeting between Amit Shah, Chief Minister Manik Saha and Pradyot Kishore Debbarma, along with senior leaders from both sides, has brought the 2024 agreements back to the political table. With it has come the question of whether the BJP can restore Tipra Motha’s confidence and retain the indigenous political goodwill it has sought to build in the hills.
At the same time, the BJP’s engagement with its other tribal ally, the IPFT, at the state leadership level adds another layer to an already complicated equation.
The BJP is therefore negotiating with two different forces whose political legitimacy is rooted in the tribal belt, even as the meaning and durability of Thansa remain uncertain on the ground. For the Village Committee election, that uncertainty will matter.
The Left Front and Congress, meanwhile, enter the contest from a far weaker position. Their grasp over the hills appears as slippery as the kacha roads that wind through them, uncertain, uneven and difficult to hold on to.
For the Left Front, this is a struggle to reclaim a political space it once dominated. For Congress, the challenge is even more fundamental.
Its organisational presence and electoral appeal among the indigenous electorate have steadily weakened, leaving it with little of the political machinery or emotional connection that once made it a serious force in the hills.
The question, therefore, is not simply whether they can win seats, but whether they can rebuild a political foothold at all.
The Mandate Meets the Government
But beneath these calculations of alliances lies the more important question: what does the hill actually want?
For all the changes in parties, alliances and governments over the past decade, one political consciousness has remained remarkably persistent: the assertion of indigenous identity and the demand for greater political and constitutional protection.
The rise of Tipra Motha did not create this consciousness. It inherited and consolidated it, giving political form to demands around Greater Tipraland, indigenous land rights and greater autonomy. The electoral evidence suggests that this consciousness has not faded.
In the April 2026 TTAADC election, Tipra Motha secured around 57.6 per cent of the vote and 24 of the 28 elected seats in the 30-member council, despite contesting against its own ally, the BJP. Its strength was already visible in the 2023 Assembly election, when it won 13 of the 20 ST-reserved seats.
The numbers suggest that Tipra Motha remains the principal political expression of the indigenous electorate’s aspirations in the hills.
Yet it is precisely here that the contradiction begins. Tipra Motha has the mandate of the hills, but its place within the government has left many questioning the extent of its actual influence.
Since entering the BJP-led government, the party has had to navigate the difficult space between being a movement born in opposition and being a partner in power.
On issues that directly touch indigenous political anxieties, from questions of land, identity, and delayed accord implementation to decisions debated in the Assembly and Cabinet, the electorate does not always see the weight of Tipra Motha’s mandate reflected in the outcomes.
The perception that the party’s role within government remains limited has consequently created an uncomfortable question: has Tipra Motha entered government to exercise power, or merely to share responsibility for a government whose larger political direction it cannot fully determine?
This anxiety becomes sharper when questions such as PRTC (state residency proof) requirements for government jobs, Kokborok script selection for higher secondary examinations, land acquisition within TTAADC areas and other matters concerning indigenous rights and political recognition enter the public conversation.
Whether or not every disagreement amounts to a formal rupture, the perception of an unequal partnership can be politically damaging. For a movement that once stood outside the establishment and challenged it in the name of the indigenous people, to be seen as unable to decisively influence the establishment from within carries its own danger.
The frustration, therefore, is not simply about the delayed implementation of the Thansa accords. It is also about the uncertainty surrounding what the alliance itself has produced.
The hills gave Tipra Motha an extraordinary mandate, but two years into its partnership with the BJP, there is a growing desire to see that mandate translated into tangible political gains.
The presence of rebel voices within the party leadership only deepens this uncertainty, raising questions about internal cohesion and whether the political force that once spoke with such clarity for the hills can maintain that clarity in government.
The frustration, however, should not automatically be read as a rejection of Tipra Motha. It may instead be the impatience of an electorate that has waited for political promises to become political outcomes.
The people of the hills have seen movements become parties, parties become governments, and governments enter into agreements. What they are now waiting to see is what those agreements actually change in their lives.
And that may be the most important undercurrent of these elections. The hill is not simply asking who can speak for its identity anymore. It is asking who can deliver on it.
Land rights, political recognition and the larger consciousness of Greater Tipraland cannot remain permanently in the language of movements and agreements. They have to acquire meaning in the everyday life of the people.
The Village Committee election, therefore, could become a test not only of Tipra Motha’s organisational strength, but of the patience of the electorate that created its political strength in the first place.
The Cost of Entering Power
There is another emotion that may quietly shape these elections: betrayal.
Tipra Motha did not rise merely as another political party. It emerged as the vehicle of an indigenous political aspiration that many voters believed established parties had failed to represent. That trust was its greatest strength. But entering government changed the terms of that relationship.
The electorate that once judged Tipra Motha by its promises is now judging it by its results. If the party is seen as having entered power without securing tangible gains on land, identity, language and autonomy, whether through the September talks or otherwise, disappointment can quickly turn into distrust.
That does not necessarily mean voters will move to the BJP, Congress or the Left. They may simply lose faith in the political bargain itself.
This is where the Village Committee election becomes important. The real danger for Tipra Motha is not losing votes to another party. It is losing the emotional trust that created those votes in the first place.
The IPFT once occupied a similar political space.
It rose by turning indigenous aspirations into an electoral force, only to see that political capital erode within a few years.
Tipra Motha inherited that space and expanded it on a much larger scale. The question now is whether it can hold what it inherited.
The hills have changed governments before. They have also moved on from movements that once seemed politically indispensable.
This election will offer the first indication of whether Tipra Motha remains the force setting the political direction of the hills, or whether, once again, the political ground has begun to shift beneath it.
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