Lip service for Manipur, poll rhetoric, whataboutery dominate no-confidence debate

If the purpose of the ongoing discussion on the no-confidence motion was to provide a healing touch to strife-torn Manipur and give its people hope of an imminent return to normalcy, MPs of the Lok Sabha seem to be doing a spectacularly bad job.

With over three-fourths of the time allotted for the three-day-long discussion now over, what appears to have taken precedence equally within the ruling BJP/NDA and the opposition’s INDIA coalition is to settle the broad strokes of the rhetoric they, respectively, wish to push forth as the 2024 Lok Sabha polls draw closer.

In the over 12 hours that the two blocs have spent debating since Tuesday (August 8), there are still no clear answers available on what led to the bloodbath in Manipur, which has so far claimed over 150 lives, nor an acknowledgement of any failure that fomented the still ongoing ethnic clashes.

What has been on ample display though is not a glide path for conciliation, return of peace and normalcy but whataboutery from the Centre and a wide-range of fleeting accusations against the Narendra Modi government by the Opposition.

Manipur situation

There is no doubt that discussion on a motion of no-confidence is not confined to a single subject but is one that affords the Opposition a chance to put the government on the mat over a wide-range of issues. Yet, the Opposition’s decision to move the motion as a “last resort” to force a nuanced debate on the ‘Manipur situation’ and the preceding build up towards it gave the impression that the cycle of ethnic violence would take centre stage when the Lok Sabha finally begins the discussion.

Two days later, and now with just a few more interventions left to be made by MPs before the Prime Minister responds to the motion, none in strife-torn Manipur or elsewhere are any wiser on the genesis and evolution of the clashes or about how normalcy would return to the state. Instead, the majority of interventions made in the Lok Sabha suggest that Manipur was merely incidental to the ongoing discussion; a tragically convenient plank for the NDA and INDIA coalitions to define their respective poll narratives for the next general elections.

Barring a handful of MPs, such as Congress’ Gaurav Gogoi, Rahul Gandhi and Manish Tewari, RSP’s NK Premachandran, DMK’s Kanimozhi, NCP’s Supriya Sule, TMC’s Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar and some others, who spent considerable time highlighting the horrors unfolding in Manipur and demanding the Centre’s response to them, a bulk of the Opposition has been more concerned about raising issues of electoral relevance for their respective parties or states.

Also read: Parliament LIVE | No-confidence motion: PM Modi to reply in LS at 4 PM

Good job, Gogoi

Gogoi, who had moved the motion, was perhaps the most descriptive among all Opposition speakers in his appraisal of the ground situation in Manipur and the impact of the unrest across the wider northeast.

The MP from Assam’s Kaliabor launched a scathing diatribe at the “maun PM (silent Prime Minister),” demanding answers from Modi on why he had not visited Manipur in the three months since violence began nor spoken a word about the unrest for nearly 80 days and why N Biren Singh was not sacked as CM for his failure to maintain law and order in the state.

Before diversifying his intervention to address the more omnipresent issues of price rise, unemployment, Chinese aggression and communal conflagrations across the country, Gogoi also spoke at length on the alleged complicity of the Manipur police in stoking the ethnic clashes and the alleged role that some politicians and the drug mafia had in fanning the unrest.

Similarly, Rahul, Kanimozhi and Dastidar, who all spoke on Day 2 of the discussion, recounted their respective experiences of visiting victims of the riots and ethnic clashes who are now living in relief camps in Churachandpur and other parts of Manipur. In an acerbic diatribe, much of which was later expunged from Lok Sabha records, Rahul accused the BJP of “murdering Bharat Mata” in Manipur.

Kanimozhi recalled how during her recent visit to a relief camp in Manipur as part of a delegation of MPs from the INDIA coalition, a Meitei girl asked her: “You have come to see us but why has the Chief Minister or the Prime Minister not bothered to visit us? We have lost our homes, families and livelihood. I will never go back to my house. I will never feel safe there. The government has let me down. Why has anybody not come here to wipe my tears?”

The DMK MP said: “Instead of listening to her pain and comforting her, the BJP fake news team manufactures a narrative saying that she told the INDIA team that she has faith in the Prime Minister and why they have come here.”

Also read: ‘With folded hands’: Shah urges Kukis, Meitis to hold talks, end violence in Manipur

Concrete suggestions

Premachandran, who spoke on Day 1 of the debate, was the only Opposition MP who spent over 80 per cent of his intervention solely on the crises in Manipur and made pointed suggestions that went beyond the typical calls for the prime minister to visit the state or the resignation of Biren Singh.

The RSP MP listed five “immediate measures” that need to be rolled out, which included, aside from Singh’s resignation, sending an all-party delegation to Manipur led by a Union cabinet minister, preferably the home minister, convening an “all-party meeting to be attended by the Prime Minister to adopt a political resolution on the basic issues of Manipur as well as the north-east”, strengthening rehabilitation and relief measures under the auspices of the Centre and not the state government, and rolling out concrete confidence building measures.

However, these few MPs aside, most others who spoke from the Opposition’s ranks made only cursory references to Manipur – the perfunctory demands for the PM to speak up, the CM to be sacked, et al – before dwelling at length on issues such as price rise, misuse of central probe agencies against political rivals and undermining of constitutional institutions by the Modi government, assaults by the Centre on cooperative federalism with the help of governors in states ruled by the opposition parties and spiralling unemployment.

For instance, while the Trinamool’s Sougata Roy spoke at length about the step-motherly treatment from the Centre in devolution of funds for West Bengal, particularly for clearing MNREGA dues, the DMK’s TR Baalu spoke about stalled projects such as the Sethusamudram, in Tamil Nadu and Rajiv Ranjan Singh ‘Lalan’ of the JD (U) spoke largely about the misuse of central probe agencies by the Modi government to topple the RJD-JDU-Congress ruling coalition in Bihar and target political rivals like RJD chief Lalu Yadav’s family.

Readying for 2024

It does not require political acumen to figure out that what the Opposition was largely doing was to firm up its electoral narrative against the Modi government with an eye on the 2024 Lok Sabha polls, while simply reiterating the resolution that their newly-formed INDIA coalition had adopted last month in Bengaluru.

In short, while the Opposition used the Manipur crises to push for the no-confidence motion, its leaders merely paid lip service in highlighting the growing unrest in the north- eastern state when the discussion on the motion actually began, choosing instead to prioritise attacks on issues that are more relevant to their respective electoral battles against the BJP.

The Centre, on the other hand, was steadfast in denying any failure on its part or on part of the BJP’s Biren Singh-led Manipur government while extolling the virtues of the Prime Minister and prophesising the certainty of the BJP’s return to power at the Centre in 2024 with an increased mandate.

When speakers from the Treasury Benches weren’t boasting about Modi’s eminence and unparalleled global stature, they were either accusing the Congress and its allies in the INDIA coalition of their failure to check crimes against women in the states they govern or of their past failures.

The whataboutery on display from the Treasury Benches has been, to put it very mildly, revoltingly appalling. Take for instance the interventions made by Union ministers Amit Shah, who as home minister is directly responsible for internal security of the country, Smriti Irani and Kiren Rijiju, the BJP’s posterboy from the northeast, each of whom spoke for more than an hour each but admitted to no lapse, forget wrongdoing, on part of the Centre or the Biren Singh government in the tragedy that has been unfolding in Manipur.

BJP speakers

While Shah, Irani, Rijiju and other speakers from the Treasury Benches all regretted the violence and gruesome incidents of women being paraded naked and raped in Manipur – could they have really said otherwise – none of them accepted that the unrest was the result of any lapse on part of the BJP’s governments at the Centre or in the state.

Shah sought to deflect the immediate blame for the violence squarely on an order by the Manipur high court. Rijiju deflected all blame for the violence in Manipur – as well as unrest anywhere else in the north-east – on past mistakes of the Congress while asserting that the region was now peaceful and progressing because of Modi.

On Tuesday, while interjecting Rahul Gandhi, Rijiju even stated at one point that the “entire population of the north-east today has turned to militancy” – a remark that should have ordinarily triggered an immediate and unequivocal condemnation by the House but was not even expunged from the Lok Sabha records.

Irani, like all her other colleagues from the Treasury Benches, dwelled at length on the “huge strides” that India had made towards progress and upliftment of women “because of Modi” but glossed over the heinous atrocities against women that have repeatedly come to light in Manipur since May.

Had it not been for her claim that investigations into the viral video showing two Kuki women being paraded naked by a group of men before they were gang-raped were on track and all culprits had been arrested soon after she spoke to the Manipur CM and urged for action, one wouldn’t have even known from her hour-long speech that something was rotten in the state of Manipur.

Instead, she chose to spend a substantial amount of time reminding the Congress of crimes against women across various states, from Jammu & Kashmir to Karnataka, since the Emergency years of the mid-1970s to the period of targeted violence against Kashmiri Pandits in J&K in the 1990s.

With the discussion on the no-confidence motion set to conclude today (August 10), with Modi set to reply, it is unlikely that anything more of any substance will be said on Manipur. Normalcy has already returned to the strife-torn state – perhaps, there had been no strife to begin with – or so much of the discussion in the Lok Sabha these past two days seems to suggest, save for the interventions of the few who chose to do right by the Manipuris.