AGARTALA, August 13 (TIWN): Royal scion of Tripura’s Manikya dynasty Pradyot Kishore Manikya Debbarman today came down heavily on Chief Minister Manik Sarkar for his statements about the Tripura royal family’s negative role in spreading education and said that the CM was no historian. He is no historian and should stop trying to re-write history, Pradyot Manikya said.Reacting to the statement, current head of Tripura’s royal family said that the Chief Minister should first take care of urgent issues at hand in Tripura like healthcare and education and then think about blaming kings who ceased to live six decades back.Asked if he contradicted the Chief Minister’s statement, Pradyot Manikya said, “These are laughable statements. I don’t feel that they need to be contradicted. People of the country know well how the Manikya kings contributed in the expansion of education and healthcare”.

Chief Minister Sarkar said while addressing the golden jubilee programme of Womens’ College in Agartala on Tuesday that monarchs of Tripura’s Manikya dynasty didn’t do anything substantial to expand education in the state. “They chose to keep education limited within the palace walls”, Sarkar said adding that the kings tortured leaders of the Jana Siksha Andolan in 1945 for raising demands of education for all.

Senior Congress leader Tapas De, who has been in the state politics for over five decades now, said that the statements of Chief Minister came as proofs of the bankruptcy of the ruling Left Front. “They are walking in the same lines of their Chinese counterparts, trying to erase the proud history of Tripura and stamp red history on it”, he said.

The Tripura monarchs contributed in the construction of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s Shantiniketan and nobody today knows about it. The Manikya dynasty was the first to recognize Tagore and the only one to provide funding for Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose for his studies abroad.

Speaking about the issue, De said that derogatory statements on the history of the Manikya dynasty were possible by the Chief Minister for his poor sense of history. “The Jana Siksha Andolan was patronized for spread of education by the Tripura kings themselves. Later the movement was picked up by the communists for political gains’, he said.

Veteran politician and INPT leader Nagendra Jamatia opposed the Chief Minister’s statements and said that Sarkar’s allegations came much like a political speech. “History says otherwise. Monarchal history of Tripura has great kings like Maharaj Bir Bikram Manikya Bahadur who worked tirelessly for spread of education in the state”, he said. Jamatia added that schools of excellence like Umakanta Academy, Maharani Tulsibati School and Maharaja Bir Bikram College were conceptualized by Maharaja Bir Bikram as a part of his Vidyapattan project- something which none of the subsequent democratic rulers of Tripura could replicate.

He said that significant historical statements should be carefully made and not based on political impulses.