GUWAHATI: The current situation in Manipur is unlikely to affect the Bharatiya Janata Party’s winning prospects in the Northeast in the upcoming Lok Sabha elections, the party’s national spokesperson Shazia Ilmi has said.
“Even if you look at the previous elections, BJP has done very well,” she said while further accusing critics of politicising the issue for vote-bank politics.
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“When you politicise every issue and just not see the real intent of what the party is doing and confuse judicial decisions and politicise them only because of vote-bank politics, it’s very unfair,” Ilmi stated.
Ilmi was speaking in the Guwahati Connection podcast, hosted by GPlus CEO Siddharth Bedi Verma, when she made these remarks.
Manipur has been witnessing a spate of violence since May 2023 when clashes had erupted between two ethnic groups in the state after the Manipur High Court had ordered the state government to send a recommendation to the central government on the demand for a Scheduled Tribe status by the Meitei community.
The ensuing violence caused hundreds of deaths and injuries, including a BJP MLA belonging to the Kuki-Zo community, who was also attacked and severely injured by a mob, while the person accompanying him had died. The violence has also caused the displacement of thousands of people, who have had to shift to other states to escape the violence.
The Supreme Court of India had stated earlier that the state underwent "absolute breakdown of the constitutional machinery," even as Prime Minister Modi was widely criticized by opponents for his silence on the situation.