Peace will be restored in Manipur, PM Modi assures Lok Sabha

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Thursday assured the people of Manipur that India and Parliament were with them and the State and Central governments were putting all efforts to bring peace and development back to the State, as his government won the motion of no-confidence amid a walkout by the Opposition. He spoke of the record of previous Congress governments in Manipur, speaking of a time when Manipur was “consumed in the conflagration of insurgency, 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.” “In all this time who was it that was running the government but the Congress,” the Prime Minister added. He also said that the present BJP-led government in the State had till now made bombs and blockades a thing of the past and they were trying to find solutions with “sincere intent.” Attacks Congress Continuing his blistering attack on the Congress, Mr. Modi recalled that it was under the late Prime Minister Indira Gandhi who had used the Indian Air Force to bomb Mizoram and its own citizens in 1966, and deploy a military attack on the Akal Takht in 1984. He said the Opposition had a fondness for using unseemly words and phrases for attacking him “and in this their favourite slogan is to say Modi we will dig your grave.” Prime Minister Modi’s speech saw the Opposition shout slogans of “INDIA” the name of the new Opposition alliance to counter the “Modi, Modi” slogans of the treasury benches. He also spoke of a 1962 radio broadcast of the late Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru during the Sino-Indian war where he said that his “heart went out to the people of Assam” a sentence, added Mr. Modi, which still hurt the people “who were left to their fate in war.” The Prime Minister targeted the socialist parties like Janata Dal, current allies of the Congress, for tying up with the party when their ideological mentor, Ram Manohar Lohia had clearly stated that it was Nehru who was “deliberately keeping back the northeast” describing it as a “careless and dangerous thing to keep 30,000 square miles of territory in a cold storage.” Terming the alliance that brought the no-confidence motion against his government “arrogant, dynastic and corrupt,” Mr. Modi added however, that no-confidence motions in the past had brought him luck as the last one in 2018 had seen the NDA return with a bigger majority.