New Delhi: Speaking in Lok Sabha Thursday, Congress MP Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury hit out at Prime Minister Narendra Modi for his silence on the Manipur violence, calling him a “blind king” and “a tyrant” and comparing him to fugitive businessman Nirav Modi.
“The NDA’s [National Democratic Alliance] strength could not touch Nirav Modi. We thought Nirav Modi had gone far away from us, but he has not. Nirav Modi is in India. Narendra Modi is acting like Nirav Modi and keeping quiet [on Manipur],” Chowdhury said.
The MP, who is also the leader of the Congress party in the Lok Sabha, said that the opposition was forced to use “parliamentary tools” to bring the Prime Minister to Parliament. He further said that the opposition moved the no-confidence motion against the Modi government despite knowing that it doesn’t have the numbers to win the vote.
“See what the strength of this motion is that we’ve dragged the PM to the House. This is the strength of parliamentary procedure. We hadn’t even thought of a no-confidence motion”, said Chowdhury.
He added: “Our demand [that the PM speaks on Manipur] was not from a BJP leader but from the Prime Minister of the country. But we don’t know why the PM was so stubborn that he refused to come to Parliament. Because of this, we had to use parliamentary tools and introduce the no-confidence motion. That’s the main reason behind the no-confidence motion.”
He asserted that the Opposition’s demand was only in the interest of the people of Manipur. To prove his point, Chowdhury said that Modi could be PM “not once, but hundred times”, drawing chuckles from the treasury benches.
“You can become PM not once, but a hundred times. We don’t care. We only care about the people of India. We went to Manipur, we saw the state of Manipur… He (the PM) should put forward the message of peace and investigate [the ethnic violence in the state]. You [the PM] should have kept your Mann Ki Baat [a reference to the PM’s address] in front of the people of India. This is not an unreasonable demand”, he said.
The PM addressed the Lok Sabha Thursday, speaking on the no-confidence motion against his government.
Last month, Modi broke his silence on Manipur for the first time since ethnic clashes between the state’s Kuki and Meitei communities broke out in May, after a video, purportedly of two women being paraded naked by a group of men in Manipur, went viral on social media.
The PM had then said that “What happened to the daughters of Manipur can never be forgiven”. He had, however, made no mention of the ethnic clashes even then.
Despite a growing clamour from the Opposition for the Prime Minister to speak on the situation, Modi has remained silent on Manipur. He had also made no mention of it in his Mann Ki Baat address in June. There were also demands for him to talk on the issue during the ongoing monsoon session of Parliament.
In his speech in Parliament Thursday, Chowdhury also sent out a rebuttal to Home Minister Amit Shah’s comments on the Manipur situation Wednesday, and answered the treasury benches’s “Quit India” statement.
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‘There should be quit India’
Hitting out at the Prime Minister for his foreign visits — US and France among others — as the Manipur crisis raged on, Chowdhury said, “You went to France and you won an award [the PM was conferred with the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honour, France’s highest civilian and military honour in July]… During the same time, the European Parliament was talking about Manipur… Manipur is an issue that cannot be confined to a state or nation. It has already assumed a global dimension. That is why the PM’s intervention is indispensable,” he said.
Commenting on Home Minister Amit Shah’s speech on the no-confidence motion Wednesday, Chowdhury said that while Shah had spoken about security forces being deployed in Manipur’s buffer zone [between Kuki and Meitei strongholds], buffer zones are meant for around the line of control (border), and that such buffer zones should not be allowed to be formed in Manipur.
“The sense of delineation will lead to geographical delineation of two warring factors”, Chowdhury said.
While talking about the purported video of women being paraded naked by a mob in Manipur, Chowdhury invoked the epic Mahabharata.
“When the king is blind [a reference to Dhritarashtra], Draupadi’s cheer haran [disrobing] will happen, whether in Hastinapur or Manipur,” he said.
The Congress MP added: “From the moon [Chandrayaan] to the cheetahs in Kuno, our PM talks about everything, but on Manipur he’s quiet.”
Chowdhury also took on the treasury benches for a comment made Wednesday that the Congress should “quit India”.
“There should be quit India. Quit India from communalism, quit India from division, quit India from saffronisation,” he said.
(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)
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