‘Can India afford a Prime Minister who treats tragedy as theatre?’

Kolkata: “Can India afford a Prime Minister who treats tragedy as theatre?” asked Bengal Education minister and senior Trinamool Congress (TMC) leader Bratya Basu while attacking the Prime Minister (PM) on his much delayed visit to the strife-torn state of Manipur since the onset of ethnic conflict between the Meitei and Kuki-Zo communities in May 2023.

Basu’s statement on the issue also reflected the mood of Trinamool Congress as he said that a “leader who surfaces only when ruins can be staged is no leader at all”. “Grief became visible to him only once it became useful,” Basu added in reference to PM Narendra Modi’s visit to Manipur. Incidentally, the violence in Manipur had left more than 250 dead and some 60,000 others displaced.

Echoing the similar concern, the ruling Trinamool Congress (TMC) on Saturday said that after 864 days of silence, the PM finally landed Manipur. “Eight hundred and sixty-four days of orchestrated silence. In that long, hollow stretch, Manipur endured unrelenting carnage, communal fracture, and the full weight of governmental abdication,” Trinamool Congress said.

Modi’s “belated discovery of Manipur” is no act of leadership, but a cynical calculation, an indictment of a regime sustained by selective empathy and performative nationalism, alleged Trinamool Congress asserting that India cannot afford a Prime Minister who remembers its states only when they lie in ruins.

Over the last two years, many Opposition parties in the country—Trinamool Congress, Congress and other INDIA bloc parties—repeatedly demanded that the PM visit Manipur, with the Opposition even raising the issue of Modi’s “silence” in Parliament on multiple occasions.

In a post on X, Trinamool Congress said: “The Prime Minister, who parades himself as the custodian of the nation’s soul, only managed to locate Manipur on the map after its people were battered into despair. While villages burned and communities bled, @narendramodi’s silence metastasized into complicity.”

According to the PIB, Modi on Saturday inaugurated multiple development projects worth over Rs 1,200 crore at Imphal in Manipur. While addressing the gathering, the Prime Minister stated that projects worth thousands of crores have been inaugurated and launched for the development of Manipur. The Opposition parties however called the delayed visit of Modi a “farce”.

TMC Rajya MP Sagarika Ghose had said: “It is the most embarrassing politics of photo ops. For more than two years, Manipur has been in crisis. Now, the PM has gone there for three hours. It is just for tokenism. It is way too little and too late.”