Branching out

On the afternoon of 18 January 2018, a surging crowd gathered at the Kadamtala market in North Tripura, undeterred by the sun. The wares on offer held little interest for most people that day. Higher stakes were at play. A month later, Tripura was to go into assembly elections  in a tightly fought contest. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a relatively new entrant to the state, was feverishly pitching itself as a harbinger of change. The Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI(M), was trying to maintain its stronghold after several decades in power. Two rival politicians from these parties, vying for the trust of over 40,000 voters in the Kadamtala-Kurti constituency, entered into an open debate.

The CPI(M)’s Islam Uddin made a moral appeal. He reminded the attendees of the increase in communal polarisation since the BJP’s Lok Sabha victory in 2014, and urged them to uphold India’s secular ethos. By most accounts, a little less than half the voters in the Kadamtala-Kuti constituency are Muslim. Any erosion in the country’s pluralistic values posed a serious threat to their rights. 

But Junu, a 31-year-old Muslim farmer, found the BJP politician Tinku Roy’s claims more resonant. “Ami jodi pass hoi, ami ekaner manush er jonno agar er license korei debo, international market korei debo (If I win this year’s election, I will legalise agar by introducing a licence for traders, farmers and creating India’s first international market [for agar] in Tripura)”, Junu recalled Roy saying. Such was the potency of this proclamation that Junu committed it to memory, reciting it with ease when Object met him in March 2024. “If I can make money and climb up the social ladder through agarwood cultivation, religion is the last thing on my mind,” he said.

WHILE THE BJP defeated the CPI(M) in the 2018 elections, Roy lost to Islam Uddin. He was elected to power from another constituency in the next assembly elections five years later, which the BJP won as well. Currently, Roy holds a number of ministerial portfolios in the state government: social welfare and education, youth affairs and sports as well as labour. According to several people Object spoke to, Roy played a significant role in advancing the state’s agarwood policy.

Through its two terms in power in Tripura, the BJP-led administration gradually eased prevailing restrictions on the cultivation and trade of agar trees, starting from the level of the local panchayat. The agarwood extracted from these trees, distinguished by its heady scent, is used in aromatics, incense and for medicinal uses. In 2021, the state government introduced the Tripura Agarwood Policy, through which it aimed to double agarwood plantation by 2025. The BJP’s manifesto for the 2023 assembly elections featured the resinous wood too. It promised industry-specific Special Economic Zones for bamboo, rubber and agar, and a proposed investment of  50 crore rupees for an ‘Agarbatti mission’ to develop the agar industry in Tripura.

Meanwhile, Junu sensed an opportunity. A year after the BJP formed the state government in 2018, he filled out forms at Tripura’s forest department to apply for new agar saplings. In order to prove that he was eligible, he had to specify the amount of private land available to him or provide a land patta, a deed issued by the government. He informed officials that he had one kani—a measurement unit roughly equivalent to 0.4 acres—of land. Consequently, he said, the department offered him 800 saplings along with a grant of 22,000 rupees to meet labour and maintenance costs. Junu spent between 10,000 and12,000 rupees and saved the rest. Four years later, he acquired 1,000 saplings more through the same process.

This was a far cry from Junu’s predicament six years ago when rubber and bamboo dominated the agricultural landscape in Tripura under the governments led by the Congress and CPI(M). Widely voiced concerns about the possible extinction of agarwood did not help. In 2018, for instance, according to a report in the Hindustan Times, the International Union for Conservation of Nature moved the Aquilaria malaccensis tree, which produces the wood, to the “critically endangered” category as “logging and deforestation” had caused a population decline of  “more than eighty percent over the past 150 years”.

As a result, the agarwood trade tended to be restricted by law. Most cultivators participated illegally, courting high risk for modest returns.

The number of those affected, according to a 2024 Non-determinant Findings (NDF) report by the Botanical Survey of India, a government research organisation,   ran into “several lakhs of people associated with cultivation, maintenance and management, harvest, processing, production, transporting, marketing, trade and export” of agar chips, oil and attendant products. “The agarwood trade is one of the main sources of income for the people of Northeast Indian states with an estimated annual trade value of more than thousands of crores in international markets,” the report added.

In 2009, Junu recalled, his father took a neighbour’s advice and planted about 100 agar trees to supplement his earnings of 150  to 200 rupees as a daily wage worker. “But the police and forest department would harass us whenever they got wind of the trade,” Junu said. Middlemen frequently short-changed the sellers; sometimes, they didn’t pay them any money at all, stealing the produce instead. “With no sustainable profits, I felt like cutting all the trees,” Junu told Object. In 2017, he felled some, replacing them with betel and rubber trees instead. The improvement was marginal. He barely made 4,000 to 5,000 rupees in a year.

The new rules brought about a change of fortune. Junu estimated that since 2019, he had sold at least 20 to 30 trees to primary traders visiting from Hojai in Assam, earning close to six lakh rupees annually. With these lucrative margins, he said, he was able to run his household, pay for his daughter’s education and buy four vehicles—three SML Isuzu trucks and one Bolero. Alongside, he expanded his agar plantations. Today, Junu owns six kani of land on both sides of his village, bursting with thousands of agar trees, stretching as far as the eye can see.
 
In theory, Junu’s triumphs bear out the BJP government’s claims of heralding economic progress in Tripura through agar cultivation. But his experience forms part of a complicated reality. While most farmers Object met from North Tripura attested to the success of the policy, official sources from the forest department were not forthcoming with any data that could shed light on its efficacy.

In the absence of these details, it is difficult to reliably evaluate whether the government has been able to meet its lofty goals, such as that of attempting to “make the agar sector a $20-billion sector in next five years”. Pinaki Das, an Agartala-based senior journalist and an assistant news editor at Northeast Live, said that while agar would create a lucrative economy, the aim of creating a $20-billion sector, “seems to be over the top without any proper assessment or study as to the number of trees present or trees that are mature and ready to produce agar”. 

Worryingly, indigenous farmers from Tripura’s tribal-dominated hill districts said that they struggled to access the policy’s benefits. An official claimed that this exclusion arose because many people from the community did not own land. But in at least one case, a farmer Object spoke to said that he was unable to get government support for agar saplings even though he had land available. Instead, when he approached the authorities, he was met with disdain.

“I would like to see this as a process, not just a distribution gap,” David Malsom, an academic  who has conducted extensive research on land rights issues in Tripura, said. Such instances, he added, were symptomatic of “potentially systemic discrimination, highlighting governance issues and the influence of middlemen misusing government funds”.

Meanwhile, for some farmers and traders, anxieties about Tripura’s communally charged atmosphere tempered any faith in the BJP, regardless of policy interventions. “When I see or hear about  the Hindu-Muslim war in the media under BJP rule, it is scary, even if such incidents haven’t occurred in my village,” Chairul Islam, a 30-year-old agar trader based out of Jalabasa in North Tripura, said. “I never heard of such communal attacks in the CPI(M) rule.”

Like Junu, most people from North Tripura that Object spoke to were familiar with agar cultivation. The farmers explained that the fungal infection usually takes place when a tree is five to six years old. Once the infection occurs, the deposition of resin could take up to ten years or more. In time, the decaying outer layer of the bark reveals the alchemy underneath, the wood’s pale brown hue morphing into a sooty black.    

The exalted status and high commercial value of agarwood—often called “liquid gold” for its rarity—came at a cost. Trees were frequently poached and smuggled, leading to the need for safeguards. Under the Indian Forest Act, 1927, which is meant to regulate the movement of forest produce, agarwood is a protected species. 

The international trade for agarwood is governed by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), a multilateral treaty that aims to ensure that the international trade of wild animals and plants does not threaten their survival. Species of the agar tree were first listed in Appendix 2 of the CITES, which categorises species for which trade needs to be controlled, in 1995. The export of agarwood was initially banned under the India’s Export-Import (EXIM) Policy in the early nineties. Currently, it is restricted, with certain provisions in place.

As of 2021, according to a government notification, the EXIM policy allowed for an export quota of 25,000 kilogrammes of agarwood chips and powder and 1,500 kilogrammes of agarwood oil from across the country every year. In July 2024, several news stories noted that based on the Botanical Survey of India’s NDF report, agarwood had been removed from the Review of Significant Trade under CITES. Additionally, the NDF had recommended an annual quota of a little over 1,50,000 kilogrammes for agarwood chips and powder or sawdust, and  7,050 kilogrammes for agarwood oil. Researchers told Object that, at least in Tripura, no new quota had become applicable yet.

Earlier, since much of the business was informal, it was shrouded in secrecy. Bargains were struck during the day; trees were cut in the dead of night. The illicit nature of the trade wrought instability upon farmers. Often, even if secondary middlemen agreed to marked-down prices, they would hoodwink the cultivators after negotiations, robbing the very produce they had agreed to purchase.

Junu recalled one such experience when he was trying to sell three agar trees that had matured. “The buyers promised us they wouldn’t steal,” he told Object. His brother and he kept a close watch on the trees for three days. On the fourth, when Junu returned home after offering namaaz early in the morning, he found two tress missing while the third was left untouched. The buyers eventually paid him only 4,000 rupees for one tree even though his estimated cost for the other two was more than 7,000 rupees. “Going by today’s rate, I would have been paid  five to six lakh rupees for the lost trees,” he said. 

A few kilometres away from Junu’s house, another farmer in his late fifties recounted similar experiences. Prakash Nath, a resident of Jalabasa in North Tripura, said that since 1990, he had owned 5 kani of land with agarwood trees. Known for growing premium agarwood trees, Nath’s name invariably came up during conversations with residents of the Kadmtala-Kurti constituency.

The farm in Nath’s backyard was a lush expanse. Hundreds of agarwood trees were dramatically spread atop a mound, called tilla in Sylheti, one of the Bengali dialects spoken in Tripura. Two tall trees stood out among the thicket, looming at about 35 to 40 metres in height. Visible along the contours of their pale yellow trunks were the holes made by a wood-bearing insect known as zeuzera conferta. Nath pointed to one of the trees. “One kilogramme of agar alone will fetch me three to five lakh rupees. If I wait it out more, the price of the tree will be higher,” he told Object.

A decade ago, Nath said, he could not get more than 5,000 rupees per tree from secondary buyers in Kathaltali, a village close to the border between Assam and Tripura. “But seeing almost everyone getting their hands dirty in the illegal agarwood trade,  I thought I could avoid the law enforcement,” he said. “I got caught only twice. People growing agarwood on khaas jomi—government-owned land—ran a higher risk of getting arrested.”

According to Nath, his earnings have climbed steadily over the past few years. In 2014, he made about three lakh rupees from selling agarwood that year; ten lakh rupees from 2017 to 2020; and 15 to 17 lakh rupees between 2020 and 2024. He used the bulk of this profit to manage domestic expenses, refurbish his house and fund the education of his two children.

Under the Tripura Agarwood Policy, 2021, the state administration had been encouraging farmers to register the trees they were growing on their private lands with the forest department. Through the registration process, they could be issued a “certificate of origin” which would come in handy at the time of the harvesting and transport of the trees, as mandated by CITES.

This “certificate of origin” is essentially a Forest Trade License. It costs about 6,000 rupees per year and has to be renewed annually. According to a government notification, for the first three years after the licence is first procured, it can be renewed for 2,000 rupees.

But Junu and Nath were apprehensive. They had not applied for the certificate because they believed that they would have to pay 500 rupees for every tree on their farmlands, a cost they deemed outrageous.

This seemed to be a misconception fuelled by rumours. Multiple people—officials at the forest department, researchers and farmers who had obtained the licence—told Object that there was no such fee. But unless farmers like Junu and Nath gain a clear idea of the money they are expected to shell out, such concerns are likely to affect the registration process. “I cannot pay 500 rupees for every 1,000 trees I own. I can think of paying tax only when I have sold my trees at the standard rate today,” Junu said.

A SLEW OF measures in the Tripura Agarwood Policy attempt to address the issues that farmers and traders face in the sale of agar trees.

The policy aims to create market linkages through the registration of agarwood-processing units under the Tripura Wood Based Industries (Establishment and Regulation) Rules, 2006, promote agarwood-based industries, and set up an agar trade centre. Since it was introduced, an official from the forest department told Object, three buyer-seller meetings had taken place with government support. 

Anfar Ali and Sailen Nath, president and secretary respectively of the All Tripura Agar Association, said that they had put forth many of these demands in 2018, based on the experiences of numerous traders. In fact, Ali—a resident of Fulbari village who has been in the business for about two decades—claimed that it was the association that brought the BJP leader Tinku Roy’s attention to the matter.

According to Ali and Sailen Nath, Roy consulted the association from time to time regarding additional interventions. Ali claimed that since the policy had been implemented, the number of agar traders in Tripura had increased threefold. (Object tried to contact Roy multiple times; the story will be updated if he responds.)

For Ali and Nath, the policy’s promised establishment of the Agarwood Trade and Research Centre was among its most important interventions. According to the policy, this centre “will mainly facilitate national and international trade”. It will provide services that include physical and online meeting spaces and trade information and education services as well as an oil-testing laboratory. 
 
When I visited Tripura, a foundation stone laid in November 2023 distinguished the site for this market in Borghuli. At the time of publication, this market had not yet become functional. According to government officials, Ali, and Nath, it is expected to start functioning in a few months.

Most traders who spoke to Object wanted to enter global markets. Chairul Islam, an agar trader from North Tripura, obtained an Agar Unit License for his agar distillation unit in 2020, around eight months after he first applied. This licence allowed him to run an agar oil factory. He was eyeing the clientele overseas. “If I am selling my products at 8,000 rupees in the Hojai market, I can sell them at 12,000 rupees in Dubai,” he told Object. 

But  procedural delays continued to be a cause for concern in the export of agarwood and attendant products. Ali told me that while he had an Agar Unit License, he struggled with the process of acquiring export clearances. The exercise involves several government departments, and in the case of agar oil, laboratory-testing in Mumbai as well. As a result, it could take anywhere between six months and  a year for the clearance to come through. “My international clients prefer to buy  agarwood products from someone who can  deliver them faster,” Ali said.

As per the norms set by the Directorate General of Foreign Trade, the annual export quota for agarwood chips is 25,000 kg while that for agar oil is 1,500 kg.  In January 2024, enabled by the export quota that was established in November 2021, Ali made his first agar oil export to UAE , resulting in a lucrative sale.

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THE SINKING FEELING of having been left out was palpable among residents of areas that fall under the Tripura Tribal Areas Autonomous District Council (TTAADC). “The policy has not benefited first-generation growers like me,” Naresh Uchoi, an agarwood farmer who also does business in agar products, told Object.

Uchoi lives in Toisakchoah village in Tripura’s Gomati district, more than 200 kilometres  from Agartala. He belongs to the indigenous Uchoi community, which, according to the 2011 population census, numbers around 2,500 people in Tripura.

Uchoi had long been interested in the agarwood business. In 2018, he started the Tiprasa Agarwood Society to encourage tribal people to participate in the trade. Two years later, he left his hospitality job in Kerala after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The timing was ripe for him to act on his long-standing interest.

A Google search led Uchoi to Tamjid Ali, the owner of Z Black Diamond Agarwood LLP, a registered company in Assam, which trades in agar products and specialises in artificial inoculations for agar trees to facilitate the production of agarwood. The meeting with Ali convinced Uchoi that he could make 10 to15 lakh rupees in the business every year. They even conducted a joint press conference in Agartala to extol the trade’s virtues.

Unlike North Tripura, where agar trees are abundant, the trees in the area that Uchoi lived in were scattered in patches. This was a potential hindrance to agarwood production. Uchoi told me that wood-bearing insects tended to attack the trees only when there was a large cluster. “They are like humans. If you have only one place to eat, you don’t go. If there are many places to eat, you go,” he said. 

In pursuit of his agarwood dreams, Uchoi found a job as an agricultural assistant with a non-governmental organisation in Amarpur town, earning a monthly salary of 16,000 rupees. In 2021, he  used his savings to buy 6,000 saplings from farmers in North Tripura, as well as injections for artificial inoculation, for around 22 lakh rupees. Uchoi planted them in neat rows on one hectare of land owned by his cousins. “Whether I own my land or cousins, it is the same,” he told me.

In 2022, he applied for the Forest Trade License for the trees he had planted. Uchoi procured an Agar Unit Licence as well so that he could start a factory to manufacture agar chips, oil and associated products.

However, many tribal people are not able to access land as readily. Since the 1940s, the political history of Tripura has been rife with increasing hostilities between tribal and non-tribal communities. The continuing migration of displaced people, in particular Bengali Hindus, from modern-day Bangladesh—before and during the Partition as well as the 1971 Indo-Pakistan war—led to demographic shifts in the state. The tribal population reduced significantly. Many of these communities were alienated from the land and resources that they earlier staked claim to. This affected their livelihoods as the land available for jhum cultivation, or shifting cultivation, which is practised by many tribal communities in the state, diminished. Economic, political and social marginalisation followed.

The Tripura Land Revenue and Reforms Act, which was passed in 1960, was meant to recoup some of these losses. Section 187 of the Act restricted the transfer of land owned by tribal people to those from non-tribal communities without the permission of the relevant district collector. But the implementation of the law left much to be desired. The scholar David Malsom said that there were many pending land restoration cases in Tripura. 

Tripura’s agarwood policy may be plagued by a similar discrepancy. In its letter, the policy encourages agar cultivation in areas beyond North Tripura, mentioning districts with dominant tribal populations such as Gomati and Khowai. But there seems to be a gap between its intent and execution.

According to the estimates provided to Object by Subrata Roy—the panchayat chairman of Kadamtala RD Block which presides over the gram panchayats of about 25 villages—over 250 beneficiaries across the gram panchayats of the Kadmtala-Kurti block availed of agar saplings at either reduced or no cost through the policy. None of these beneficiaries were tribal people. “You need to own at least one bigha of land”—approximately 0.6 hectares—“to qualify as a beneficiary,” Roy said by way of explanation.

This puts people from tribal communities at an inherent disadvantage. Even if they apply to the government for a patta on forest land, their access to agar saplings through the policy is not a given. Moreover, the entire process takes a considerable amount of time before they can even begin cultivation.

In the 1970s for instance, first the Congress and then the CPI(M) encouraged rubber cultivation in the state. This was done partly to stem insurgency and partly to provide sustainable employment for jhum cultivators who had lost their land. It propelled a new generation of agricultural entrepreneurs in the state.

As part of its efforts, the government provided land deeds to farmers from indigenous communities. “Rubber cultivation ensured progress for all sections of society, tribals and non-tribals alike. We gave grants to landless jhumias,” Islam Uddin told Object. But even the success story of rubber may not have been as inclusive as he claimed. “I don’t know how many people who practised jhum took to rubber, but many who didn’t definitely made their fortunes from it,” Bindu Ranjan Chakma, a political science teacher at Agartala’s Maharaja Bir Bikram University told the news website Scroll.in. 

The implementation of the Forest Rights Act for the distribution of land deeds has been patchy at best. “In most cases, a land patta is given nominally. Just a document or paper pertaining to the land without any demarcation,” the senior journalist Pinaki Das said. “Let’s say if there is an assessment that a natural resource is available on government land, the people with land pattas will be evicted, as lack of proper demarcation puts them in a vulnerable state regarding their land claims.” The lack of proper demarcation, he noted, meant that they could be evicted without any compensation.

Uchoi pointed out that people who didn’t own land themselves could also lease it through kith and kin within their families. “As long as you can show jhut zameen”—land that has been owned by tribal people for centuries—“there should be no issue with regard to access to plantation schemes or certificates,” he told Object.

The push towards monoculture plantations, be it agar or rubber, gave rise to adverse environmental consequences. Malsom pointed out that such plantations “lead to reduced soil carbon and are less drought-resistant”, impacting plant establishment and growth. Priyadarsanam Dharma Rajan, a senior fellow at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment (ATREE), noted that the problem was not posed by only rubber or agarwood. “The pressing issue in Tripura and other north-eastern states revolves around large-scale oil palm plantations by corporations, often promoted by governments,” he said.

Uchoi recounted stories he had heard from his elders about rains that flooded the village before rubber trees blanketed the landscape; a stark contrast to the water shortages they face now. As a kid, standing on a bridge across a tributary of the Gomati river, he would often spot hoolock gibbons—the only ape species in India—leaping from one tree to  another. They are a rare sight now. Studies from Tripura show that the transformation of tropical forests into monoculture tree plantations forced these primates to change their former habitats.

In Uchoi’s case, neither was lack of land a problem nor did he spare any effort in trying to access saplings under the policy. But when he requested government authorities for 1,000 saplings, he was told that they had limited stocks. An official derided him for his ambition. Uchoi was met with a similar attitude when he approached  the same government body for loans between 10 and15 lakh rupees to start a distillation unit for the extraction of agar oil. “We are the first-generation agar growers unlike the people in the north of the district,” he said. “They don’t value us as much as they do them. Nothing has turned positive in our case.”

Uchoi said that a friend of his from a nearby village, who also belonged to a marginalised tribal community, was able to avail of saplings from the government. According to Malsom, in such instances, a representative from the village usually followed up on behalf of the resident. 

But a system within which promised rights are dependent on the advocacy of influential individuals is hardly ideal. “The local political representative decides who should be selected as beneficiaries. In this sense, one can comprehend why the tribal farmers in TTAADC areas are forced to buy  material for any plantation from their own pocket,” Malsom said.

Encouraged by a businessman who had promised to buy inoculation-induced resin from him, Uchoi zealously planted agar saplings. But the buyer’s interest later waned. “I spent more than two lakh rupees on the cultivation and inoculation. I was not able to make any profit out of this,” he told Object.

But Uchoi did not give up. He believed his investments would reap dividends if he was able to secure bank credit for his distillation unit. Lumen Uchhoi, Naresh’s relative, was not as convinced. Till he was sure, he said, he would stick to cultivating the 115 rubber trees that were planted about seven years ago on the 1.5 kani of land he owned. He told Object that he made a profit of  300 rupees per day, roughly 75,000 rupees a year. He was unwilling to forsake that for agarwood just yet. He was waiting to see how Naresh Uchoi fared.

“It will take some time, but the business will be profitable in a few years,” Naresh Uchoi said. “We are trying our best. If not crorepatis, at least we can be financially independent.”

FOR MANY FARMERS, promises of economic prosperity paled in comparison to the spectre of communalism.

In mid-October 2021, parts of Bangladesh witnessed deadly conflicts between Hindus and Muslims, which claimed the lives of seven people. The strife was triggered by an incident in which a Quran was found at a Durga Puja pandal in the city of Cumilla. On the other side of the border, in Tripura, the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, an affiliate of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, organised a series of rallies in protest. Soon after, anti-Muslim violence engulfed several towns in the state. Numerous mosques were vandalised and even burned down, and the homes and businesses of Muslims were attacked and destroyed.

“This is the first time since Partition that we are seeing Hindu-Muslim violence,” Suhas Chakma, the director of the Rights & Risks Analysis Group, told the news website Newslaundry. The BJP-led state government underplayed the unrest. Journalists, lawyers and activists were booked under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act for publishing news stories and fact-finding reports or even mentioning the violence on social media.

Mohammad Alauddin Ahmad, an agarwood farmer in his late seventies, hadn’t faced any violence in his village in Dakshin Kadamtala. But he was aware of the BJP’s communal agenda in the rest of the country. He had been waiting for the realisation of the agarwood policy’s promised international access since 2020. This would only be possible once the Borghul market was up and running. Ahmad said that while  the rates he was able to charge for his trees were higher than those during the CPI(M) era—between 30,000 and 40,000 rupees per tree—they were still not as profitable as he believed they ought to be. 

The agar trader Chairul Islam, recalled one distressing incident from 2018, after the BJP won 96 percent of the seats uncontested during the panchayat elections in the state. Workers from the party were chanting ‘Jai Shri Ram’ (Hail Lord Ram) on the streets and scuffling with those from the CPI(M) at Paschim Chandrapur, about five kilometres away from Islam’s house. As the situation intensified, his sister, who lived there, grew uneasy and called him. “She was in tears,” he said. His Hindu friends offered to drive her to a safer place. “They asked me not to take my car, which has  number 786 on its plate,” Islam recounted. In his village, Muslims and Hindus had always lived in harmony, sharing their joys and sorrows, participating in each other’s festivals and weddings. But those sturdy foundations were developing cracks.

“Across entire India, we have seen the BJP attacking minorities and marginalised communities. In the name of the Ram Mandir, the government has tried to divide the people here as well,” said the CPI(M)’s Islam Uddin. He has so far been undefeated by a BJP candidate in the Kadamtala-Kurti constituency.

Most people Object spoke to were from villages in this constituency, where the CPI(M)’s grip has been strong. However, the BJP seems to be closing in. In the 2018 assembly elections, Islam Uddin beat Tinku Roy by nearly seven thousand votes. During the next state polls in 2023, the CPI (M) politician secured a narrow victory, with about two thousand votes more than the BJP candidate Dilip Tanti. Mihir Debnath, a political analyst who is affiliated with the BJP, attributed some of these electoral gains to the party’s push for agar. “If not for the agarwood policy, we would be losing one percent of Muslim voters and five percent of Hindu voters,” he claimed.

During the recently concluded general elections, the push towards an agar-based economy did not seem to have had a substantial impact on the BJP’s prospects in Tripura. Palash Sen, a journalist based out of Dharmanagar told Object that while Tinku Roy, the politician who is said to have advanced the government's agar policy, exercised some influence in North Tripura during the polls, the party's victory could not be attributed to either him or the scheme. “Other BJP leaders came into play as well,” Sen said.

In Tripura East, which represents most of the indigenous constituencies, Malsom said that agarwood cultivation was eclipsed by more pressing issues. These included the land alienation faced by tribal people, the demand for strengthening the provisions of the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution—which relates to the administration of tribal areas in the states of Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura and Mizoram—as well as the inclusion and representation of tribal people in non-tribal areas. In March 2024, days before the Lok Sabha polling dates were announced, the Tripura Indigenous Progressive Regional Alliance or the Tipra Motha, which had long demanded a separate state for the tribal communities of Tripura, joined the BJP-led coalition government in the state. It was the largest opposition party in Tripura before the alliance.

The state concluded voting for the Lok Sabha elections on 26 April 2024 amid a tumultuous atmosphere. Politicians from the CPI(M) and the Congress alleged that their voters were threatened and their polling agents were not allowed to enter booths in several places. Representatives from the CPI(M) also wrote to the Election Commission of India regarding voter turnouts that exceeded 100 percent in three assembly segments. (A story in the Economic Times noted that the State Election Commission attributed these discrepancies to officials who were on duty and cast their votes in addition to those cast by voters registered in those constituencies.) About 1,700 voters in East Tripura reportedly boycotted the election to protest against the lack of development in the areas they hailed from. Nearly 30 officials involved in the polling process in the state were suspended by the Election Commission for “various breaches and violations of orders”.

The BJP’s candidates emerged victorious in both the Lok Sabha seats from the state.

Meanwhile, Chairul Islam, who established his agar business in 2017, has yet to see the promised uptick in his returns. He attributes this to the fact that his business is only a few years old. While the BJP had facilitated trade in the region, he said, it was still too early for him to gauge the success of its policies. “I am yet to get a profitable payback for my investment in the trade,” he said.

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