Is Manipur CM reading from BJP’s 2002 Gujarat playbook?

When the 2002 communal violence took place in Gujarat, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee tried to get Chief Minister Narendra Modi to resign. But the rank and file of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) backed Modi to the hilt.

At that point he was not an elected Chief Minister, and had been selected by the BJP high command to replace a discredited state leadership. The scale of the violence and polarisation, however, established Modi firmly as the protector of Hindus — and the individual who would show minorities their place in India. It should not, therefore, be forgotten that these are the roots of the current BJP leadership ruling India.

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The recent video of two tribal women in Manipur walking naked and being molested by a crowd has shaken the country, from the judges of the Supreme Court to ordinary citizens. We are asking for answers and punishment. Yes, the Centre did make a request to ask the BJP Chief Minister N Biren Singh, to resign, but no one seems to be pushing him too hard to demit office. He joined the BJP from the Congress in 2017, and has been Chief Minister since then. It’s worth stressing that it was only in 2022 that the BJP won a majority on its own in Manipur. As Chief Minister, Singh has often been accused of pushing an anti-tribal agenda.

The North-East is a multi-dimensional jewel with many tribes and faiths: Christian, Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist, to name a few. It is fragile. It always needed to be handled with care, delicately, or else it would crack, as Manipur has now. Yet with so much hate in the air, the Chief Minister that the national media wants sacked (as 21 years ago it did with the Chief Minister of Gujarat), is seen as a hero of the Meitei community (53 per cent of the population) who are the Hindu settlers in Imphal Valley. The tribes, the Kukis (16 per cent) and Nagas (24 per cent) are mostly Christians. The current conflict is between the Meitei and the Kuki.

These are the ugly distortions that emerge when we set one community or tribe against another; when we do not speak the language of unity, but utilise the politics of division. The politics we have seen some BJP regimes practice are designed to bring out the worst prejudice in human minds, to fan fears and provoke fights over land and hypothetical losses/gains, and use women’s bodies as the sites of conquest. It happened to Bilkis Bano in Gujarat 21 years ago, and is happening to Kuki women in Manipur today.

We are staring into the abyss in the North-East and the abyss is not just staring back at us, it is also mocking us. For decades now, we heard accounts of how the RSS missions were active in the North-East states, keeping an eye on Christian missions and positioning themselves as protectors of Hindus in a complex region known for insurgencies, a historic alienation of certain tribal communities, and the presence of the Indian Army.

The BJP is in power in four states in the North-East — Manipur, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, and Tripura. Within the largest state Assam, identity issues have traditionally played out as insider/outsider, Bengali and Assamese that at times would overlap into Hindu versus Muslim. Even as Manipur is burning, the most popular BJP Chief Minister of the North-East routinely speaks the language of ascending hate as if he is seeking to light another fire around the fault-line of Hindu vs Muslim. That is always a neater construct for the BJP/RSS than Meitei vs Kuki, unless we give it the Hindu vs Christian dimension.

Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, also a former Congressman now showing his worth to the RSS, is credited with opening up the gates of the North-East to the BJP post-2014. There has been speculation that his crass and communal statements — the most recent being that Miyans (Bengali Muslims) are responsible for rising vegetable prices — come from the strategic need to keep the pitch polarised as there are also signs of a Congress revival in Assam. He would like the Bengali Muslim votes to stay with Badruddin Ajmal’s All India United Democratic Front (AIUDF) and not transfer to the Congress. Assam has 14 Lok Sabha seats, and Manipur has two.

Simultaneously, Sarma’s BJP predecessor, Sarbananda Sonowal, who served a full term (2016 to 2021), did not plumb to such communal depths and though he had his bases. Sarma is, reportedly, defining his term by upping Hindu vs Muslim, Assamese vs Bengali, and by Machiavellian moves in the other small states. But what does Machiavelli do when the house has burnt down? Meanwhile, N Biren Singh remains a hero to his community. So, can the current BJP leadership in New Delhi push Singh out for following a template it created years ago in another part of India?

Saba Naqvi is a journalist and author.

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.