Prognosis from MPCC leader The last 17 months

It may be dismissed as the politician in him speaking, but the claim of former MLA and working president of the Manipur Pradesh Congress Committee (MPCC) Md Fajur Rahim that the BJP may find no takers in the next election (Assembly) reflects the sense of exasperation with the failure of the BJP led Government at Imphal and Delhi to take up anything concrete to resolve the ongoing ethnic clash. Take the observation or claim of the MPCC working president along with the internal differences that appear to have cropped up within the State unit of the NPP and things may just begin to make sense. The resounding victory registered by Congress candidates in both the Inner and Outer Parliamentary seats in the recently held Lok Sabha elections also fall in line with the observation made by Md Fajur Rahim and this may just about fall in line with the perception of the public, the man on the street who will decide which political party is voted to power when the next Assembly elections come knocking in 2027. Not that such a scenario would have missed the reading of the BJP leadership in Manipur, but the important question is, what course of action can the people expect from them in the coming days and what formula they would be able to whip out to come to the people with a presentable face when the time to vote comes. No easy answer here, and to be sure the Congress must have started working on their future course of action and see what strategies to adopt to win the confidence and trust of the people. This is 2024 and the next Assembly election is a good 2.5 years away, but it stands that plans and processes are put in motion much before the election is held and surely it would have taken years of preparation for the BJP to come back to power in 2014 after the Congress had a ten year period in power under Dr Manmohan Singh as the Prime Minister. As things stand right now, the BJP Government is beginning to show that the ongoing clash has not blinded it to the need to govern and the series of meetings that Chief Minister N Biren had during his recent visit to New Delhi testifies this. Seven thousand houses under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, 50 National Highway projects with focus on the hills are some of the more positive information that the Chief Minister has been able to get from Delhi but whether this would be able to put the BJP back in the good books of the people is a matter of conjecture. No one knows when normalcy, as normalcy is understood universally, would return to Manipur and the fact remains that after the much tom-tommed October 15 meeting between Meitei and Kuki-Zo MLAs at New Delhi with three Naga MLAs in attendance, nothing is known on what exactly the Meitei MLAs had to say or put across during the meeting. As for the Kuki-Zo MLAs, everyone knows that they reportedly stuck to the line, ‘No peace talks unless the demand for a Separate Administration is addressed to’ and this is where one can see a mark difference in the manner in which the Meitei and Kuki-Zo MLAs attended the Delhi meeting.
There is still time before the next Assembly election and one wonders what formula one can expect the BJP to whip out to win back the confidence and trust of the people. A dialogue process has been set in motion thanks to the October 15 Delhi meeting but it remains that a lot of ground still remains to be covered and this is where it becomes important to remind all that this is the condition even after the ethnic clash has completed 17 months. A beginning has been made, no doubt about that, but with no one really knowing what was put across from the side of the Meitei MLAs, all drawn from the BJP and representing the Government of Manipur, it would not have pulled the saffron party any higher in the perception of the people. The BJP has to seriously look back at the last 17 months and see if it has dealt with the ethnic violence in the manner a Government should else there is no reason why the prognosis of the working president of the MPCC will not come true. The lessons from the Lok Sabha elections of 2024, the internal affairs of the NPP revolving around the question of whether it should continue to have any truck with the BJP or not, the failure of instil confidence even after the October 15 Delhi meeting are immediate instances that come to mind and the BJP can only afford to ignore these tell tale signs at its own peril. At the moment, it stands that the saffron party has failed to deal with the ongoing ethnic clash.