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India plugs Bangladesh border

REUTERS, Mandai Bazar, India
India sealed its eastern frontier with Bangladesh yesterday as the strife-torn border state of Tripura prepared for the second phase of voting in the world's largest democracy.
Thousands of police and paramilitary troops were deployed and air surveillance ordered in Tripura, which votes on Thursday. India says tribal insurgents fighting New Delhi's rule and who have vowed to disrupt the election are based in camps in Bangladesh.Dhaka denies the charge.
"The threat from insurgents to the election remains," said state police chief Gyanshyam Murari Srivastava. "We are adding dozens more security posts near the border as a second line of defence."
India kicked off its five-phase election on Tuesday with sporadic
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incidents of violence across the country, including in Kashmir, which has been torn by a separatist revolt for 14 years.
Opinion polls have forecast Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee's coalition, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), will come back to power on the coat-tails of his personal popularity and a booming economy.
But in Tripura, communists are expected to regain the state's two seats up for grabs. Counting is set for May 13 and results expected the same day.
While communist regimes have been collapsing in the rest of the world, the left has been in power in the remote northeastern state of 3.3 million people since 1978, barring a five-year period between 1988 and 1993.
"We communists believe in empowering people and a people's revolution," Bijan Dhar, a top leader of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M), the country's biggest left party, said in Agartala, Tripura's capital.
"To achieve that in Tripura, we must achieve tribal and non-tribal unity and thisis one of our key election points."
While the booming economy and peace with Pakistan are key election issues at the national level, Tripura is concerned with regional problems like a separatist insurgency and ethnic tension between tribals and Bengali settlers.
India's northeast is home to some 200 ethnic and tribal groups and about two dozen insurgent groups who accuse New Delhi of exploiting the region's resources without developing the area and allowing outsiders to pour into the region.
Over the years, Tripura's indigenous population has been reduced from a majority of over 52 percent in 1951 to a minority of around 30 per-
cent because of the entry of waves of Bengali settlers from Muslim-majority Bangladesh.
"Like the tiger, we tribals of Tripura are endangered by Bengali settlers," Barma said.