Modi’s silence on Manipur has destroyed the State’s credibility

During his belated visit to strife-torn Manipur in end-May, Union Home Minister Amit Shah asked that “peace be given a chance for the next 15 days for a solution to be achieved.” No one cared for his appeal during those 15 days, and immediately after, the house of his colleague, junior External Affairs Minister R K Ranjan Singh, in Imphal was stormed by a mob and set on fire. Fortunately, he was not at home.

This is the second time the minister’s house has been attacked by a mob. During the attack in May, when the minister was present, security personnel had fired in the air to disperse the mob. That incident had taken place when Army Chief Gen Manoj Pande was on a visit to the state. The minister had kept quiet then, but after his residence was burnt down this time, he couldn’t control his anger: “I am shocked. The law-and-order situation in Manipur has totally failed.”

Watch | Tensions continue in Manipur: 10 opposition parties question PM's silence

He is right. The Indian State has simply collapsed, its credibility in tatters. The shambolic scenes at play in Manipur over the past six weeks have never been witnessed in independent India. More than 4,500 weapons have been ransacked – rather handed over to local militia and mobs – from State armouries. Kashmir, considered the benchmark of violent militancy in India, has barely a fraction of that number with the militants. In Manipur, the violence is not between militants and security forces; it is between two communities, involving ordinary civilians.

To call this a civil war may be unpalatable but it would not be inaccurate. Where else would women be organising themselves to block roads so that the central forces and the army may not reach areas where mobs are attacking villages of other ethnic denominations? They are, in fact, stopping vehicles of central forces to check the identity of soldiers to see if there are any of a particular ethnicity involved in the conflict. Vehicles carrying food supplies and other essentials for Assam Rifles are not being allowed to move. Some Assam Rifles units had to receive army supplies by helicopter. These are unprecedented happenings by any yardstick.

The failure is all-round and all-encompassing. The BJP state government and its CM lead the way with their disastrous record, but continue to remain in office for some inexplicable reason. Amit Shah has failed, too, demonstrably so after his much-publicised four-day visit. His emissary, Assam CM Himanta Biswa Sarma, grabbed the headlines with his unusual visit to Imphal and negotiations in Guwahati with Kuki militant groups, but it has made no difference to the situation in Manipur. The Centre appointed a new security adviser, a retired police officer, who has failed to stop violence, let alone restore peace. So has the new DGP of the state, who has been brought in from outside the state.

The buck, however, doesn’t stop with any of them. It stops with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who has not uttered a word on Manipur for the past 45 days. With more than 135 lives lost and 60,000 persons rendered homeless, Modi’s silence is baffling. It is a tactic he regularly uses to deal with inconvenient issues. From the Chinese ingress on the border in Ladakh, the allegations of Adani’s crony wrongdoing, wrestlers’ protests on alleged sexual harassment by a BJP MP, holding of the decadal census, to the holding of elections in Kashmir, he has avoided talking about issues that reveal him in poor light.

If Modi hopes that he can wish away the Manipur crisis by staying silent, he is mistaken. By now, ethnic divides have become deeply entrenched and the security-centric approach of creating buffer zones between the Meitei and the Kuki is making the gulf permanent. Crying for a political solution, the people now feel completely abandoned by Modi, who exhorted them to vote for a ‘double-engine’ government in the state two years ago. His indifference towards Manipur, while he goes campaigning for elections in Karnataka, to the train accident site in Odisha or chairs a disaster management conference for cyclone Biprajoy in Gujarat, only reinforces the sentiment.

His supporters may argue that he is concerned about Manipur but that would mean that he is stunned into inaction, like a rabbit caught in the headlights. It becomes then a display of incompetence and ineptitude, both as a political leader and as an administrator. To preside over the wilful destruction of the authority of the Indian State in a sensitive border state cannot be a feather on Modi’s cap. His conduct on Manipur defies common sense.

What matters to 140 crore Indians is not the harm this attitude personally causes to Modi, but the damage it does to India. Since independence, this country has faced its share of serious challenges – from Nagaland and Mizoram to Punjab and Kashmir – but no Union government has allowed things to reach a pass as they have reached in Manipur today. State governments have been sacked, President’s rule imposed, professional governors posted, and the army given a free hand to bring the violence down for far less, as prime ministers have been known to undertake serious political engagement. Modi has been found wanting.

Finally, prime ministers in any healthy democracy are held accountable by a free press. Hardly any television channel or newspaper has questioned Modi’s silence on Manipur or the Centre’s failures there. As a thought experiment, consider anyone else as PM instead of Modi. Would newspapers be as blind toward another PM’s indifference to a state that continues to burn for 45 days? Modi is travelling, instead, to the UN compound to lead exercises there on World Yoga Day. But no yogic pose exists that can allow Modi to shut his eyes to the deep erosion of the credibility of the Indian State his (in)actions in Manipur have caused.

(From defusing IEDs in Kashmir to teaching at Yale, former army man Sushant Singh has made all the unwise choices in life, including journalism, wonkery and corporate@SushantSin.)