Beed: Prime Minister Narendra Modi did not go to Manipur and spoke about it only for the briefest time, veteran Opposition leader Sharad Pawar said today, slamming the Central government and the BJP and Eknath Shinde's alliance government in Maharashtra.
"In Manipur, there's a division among society, villages, people are attacking each other, houses are being burned, women are being paraded naked but despite that the BJP government doesn't do anything," Mr Pawar said today, pointing out that the job of maintaining law and order belongs to state. Manipur has a "double-engine" government -- the BJP rules the state as well.
"The Prime Minister of India should have gone to Manipur but he didn't do that. He spoke about Manipur for 3 minutes before the session and only for 5 minutes during No-Confidence Motion," he said, speaking at a rally in Maharashtra's Beed.
"The Prime Minister didn't understand the pain of the women in Manipur," added Mr Pawar, whose faction of Nationalist Congress Party was among those which moved a No-Confidence Motion against the Narendra Modi government. The idea was to compel the Prime Minister to speak to Manipur -- a key Opposition demand that the government refused to meet.
PM Modi had spoken of Manipur only twice since ethnic violence broke out in the northeastern state on May 3.
During his response to the No-Confidence Motion in Lok Sabha last week, he referred to the issue after nearly 90 minutes, once the Opposition members had walked out.
Holding the Congress responsible for "being the origin of all problems in the northeast", PM Modi said the country was with the people of Manipur and the "sun of peace" would rise in the state again.