At 10,039 square kilometres, Tripura is northeast India's smallest state. But this was not always so. The Manikya rulers controlled much of East Bengal's Comilla region during medieval times, and later Maharaj Bijoy Manikya is said to have had the rein from the hills all the way west to present-day Dhaka. With royal patronage, tolerance and multiculturalism flourished in an area otherwise divided by ethnicity and religion. As late as the year 2000, readers of the Agartala-based daily Tripura Observer voted Maharaja Bir Bikram as 'Tripura's Man of the Millennium' in preference to those who have led the state since the end of the royal order.
Even after the advent of the British, when the Tripura kingdom was restricted to its present hill confines, Bengalis and indigenous tribes-people lived in peace. No riots, not even sporadic ethnic clashes were ever reported between Bengali settlers and the original populace of princely Tripura. If the Manikyas welcomed Bengali professionals or peasants to modernise their administration or increase their land revenue through the spread of settled wet-rice agriculture, they also created a tribal reserve, which, in many ways, is the precursor of today's Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council.
The Partition unleashed a wave of migration from East Pakistan to Tripura and other states on its borders. Though the indigenous tribes-people in the state had not enjoyed a decisive majority like in the neighbouring Chittagong Hill Tracts or the Mizo hills, they did account for up to 60 percent of the total population. In the first three decades after Partition, the indigenous people were reduced to below 30 percent of the state's population, a situation which left them completely marginalised in both self-perception and reality. This land alienation it is which has fuelled the violent insurgency that has eaten into the vitals of this once vibrant state.
The problem did not emerge as long as the tribals had enough land and the Bengali population was limited to certain urban or semi-urban pockets or rural areas around the capital. That changed with Independence and the merger of princely Tripura in the Indian Union. A state which in 1951 had a population of 6.5 lakh saw an influx between 1947 and 1971, of six lakh Bengalis displaced from East Pakistan. It is not difficult to gauge the enormous population pressure thus created. During this period the state government primarily resettled the refugees on land under different schemes, some enabling the refugees to settle down with financial assistance and some just helping them to buy land.