The Tripura government signed a Rs 45 crore rehabilitation deal with surrendered guerrillas in 2007, acknowledging that people who gave up...

The Tripura government signed a Rs 45 crore rehabilitation deal with surrendered guerrillas in 2007, acknowledging that people who gave up their weapons and returned to civilian life deserved permanent resettlement and economic support. The programme ran from 2008 to 2018, utilized Rs 23 crore, and then stopped — citing a change in government and, later, a pandemic. The remaining Rs 22 crore stayed on paper. Despite years of formal representations, nothing moved. On June 1, the Tripura Guerrilla Returnees Demand Committee announced it would launch an indefinite blockade of the Assam-Agartala National Highway and railway lines from June 5 — severing Tripura's only surface link to the rest of India. The timing was, at minimum, efficient: June 5 is also the day Union Home Minister Amit Shah was scheduled to visit Tripura to review border security and infrastructure along the India-Bangladesh frontier. The former guerrillas and the minister responsible for internal security were set to converge on the same state, on the same day, over entirely different definitions of what had been secured.