As his government defeated the motion of no-confidence in the face of the opposition’s walkout, Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday assured the people of Manipur that India and the Parliament were behind them and that both the State and Central governments were making every effort to restore peace and development to the State.
The opposition claimed that it staged a walkout because Mr. Modi had not brought up the subject of Manipur 90 minutes into his two-hour speech.
After the Opposition left, the Prime Minister addressed the State, saying: “The violence in Manipur is saddening. The Central and State governments are working together to ensure those responsible are punished because crimes against women are unacceptable.
We would like to reassure our mothers and daughters in Manipur that this nation and this House support them. He gave the Indian people his word that the State will soon return to peace and progress. He continued, “Let us understand the pain and become the medicine to heal together.” “Dard ko samajh kar, dard ki dawaa ban kar saath chalein,” he said.
But while talking about giving the people of Manipur a healing touch, Mr. Modi noted that many of the issues that had risen up in the State were not recent, but rather a holdover from the State’s prior Congress governments.
The “New World Order”
“The Opposition, who moved this motion, is quite picky about what suffering and empathy it expresses. Politics is the beginning and the end of everything, he observed. The Prime Minister continued by saying that, in contrast to the Opposition, he considered the northeast to be his “Jigar ka tukda” (a piece of his heart), and that he and his Council of Ministers had travelled there more than 400 times.
He also listed the infrastructure and other development projects carried out there by his government. Although the northeast may seem far away to you, he predicted that a shifting global order will witness the emergence of the ASEAN region and bring it into sharper focus.
Manipur’s current issues are being discussed as though they occurred recently, according to Mr. Modi. Manipur was “consumed in the conflagration of insurgency,” he said, “when the administration was under the sway of insurgents and the national anthem was banned from being sung in schools, when insurgents bombed the ISKCON temple, when the bells of temples stopped ringing by 4 p.m. and security forces had to guard these locked temples.”
The Prime Minister said, “In all this time, who else but the Congress was in charge of the government?”
