Manipur, redux
On a state in ruins and a prime minister in denial
The newly reconfigured Niti Aayog meets tomorrow under the aegis of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The chief ministers of all Opposition-ruled states are boycotting the meeting, arguing that there is no point attending a fiscal planning meeting when the Centre has so openly discriminated against them in the Union Budget. Among other things, the total boycott signals that Centre vs States is likely to be a running firefight in the NDA government’s third term.
But the most bizarre item of news surrounding the meeting is this: It will be the first time Modi and #Manipur chief minister N Biren Singh will be in the same room after ethnic conflict broke out in the state on 3 May last year.
Biren Singh had, way back in January, sought a meeting with Modi, but the PM had no time for him. In June, three delegations from Manipur camped in Delhi hoping for a meeting with the PM, but with no luck.
Now Biren Singh is reportedly hoping — hoping! — for one-on-one time with the PM on the sidelines of the Niti Aayog meeting, to “brief the PM” on Manipur’s critical issues. Why would he need to do that, when he also says that he is in touch with the PM 24/7?
All of this is part of Modi’s ‘Teflon PM’ playbook. Whenever something goes wrong, Modi takes great care to distance himself from it — crumbling infrastructure, civil war in Manipur, China’s transgressions along the LAC, a collapsing railway ecosystem, whatever, he doesn’t want to know, because what he doesn’t know about, he can’t be held accountable for.
The state, meanwhile, continues to simmer. The latest development is that the Naga rebel group NSCN-IM has taken a hand, terming the ongoing violence an attack on Christian Kukis by Meitei armed group Arambai Tenggol. In a statement to the media, the group says:
“It is, therefore, natural that NSCN should take a stand to guard the interest and safety of the Christians in Manipur, given the fact that Arambai Tenggol bears a strong animosity towards the Christians, both in spirit and action”
Just what the troubled state needs — an armed Naga rebel group threatening to take a hand in the conflict.
Meanwhile the Manipur police reports problems with its wireless handsets, hampering communications even as sporadic acts of violence continue in various parts of the state.
In Parliament the Congress, which won both Lok Sabha seats from Manipur, has called out the Union government for making no special provisions for the state. The party points out that while the Finance Minister has provided financial assistance to flood-hit Assam, Manipur, despite suffering the twin blows of a catastrophic hailstorm and two successive floods for the first time in over 20 years, did not even merit a mention, far less special aid, in the Budget speech.
How does a Central government, whose motto is supposedly sabka saath, sabka vikas, sabka vishwas, get away with so casually, callously, ignoring a state where a civil war has been raging for 452 days now, and counting?
This week, the US State Department updated its travel advisory to include Manipur, warning of terrorism and rape (emphasis mine):
Revising its travel advisory to include the northeastern states in India, the United States has asked its nationals to not travel to Manipur, Jammu and Kashmir, the India-Pakistan border, and areas in the country where Naxalites are active. In its advisory, the State Department has mentioned that “rape is one of the fastest growing crimes in India, sexual assault at tourist sites and terrorist attacks with little or no warning” to discourage travel to the country.
In this connection, note that the tourism sector’s outlay has been increased in the 2024 Budget “to achieve ‘Amrit Kaal’ vision”, whatever that is. Sitharaman in her speech said:
Tourism has always been a part of our civilization. Our efforts in to positioning India as a global tourist destination will also create jobs, stimulate investment and unlock economic opportunity for other sectors
It reminds me of Shashi Tharoor’s speech in Parliament this week, in course of which he said the Union Budget reminds him of the mechanic in the garage who told his customer “I couldn’t fix your brakes, but I have increased the volume of your horn.”
Much has been written, and more will be, about the withdrawal of Joe Biden and the overnight emergence of Kamala Harris as the Democratic Party candidate for President of the United States.
The overarching narrative, swamping both news sites and social media, is that the dynamics of the race has turned on its axis — from an old man mocking an even older man to a younger woman with a track record as prosecutor and a gift for oratory taking on a convicted felon whose meandering speeches are to oratory what Calmpose is to insomnia. For plot twists, I can’t think of any election in living memory that even comes close.
In the midst of all the brouhaha, what struck me was how the media resurrected an earlier interview given by Donald Trump’s running mate JD Vance to then Fox News host Tucker Carlson, where he said the problem was that the country was being run “via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs by a bunch of childless cat ladies”, naming Harris among others.
In what has been an unusually hectic week, I’ve been using the fallout of that remark to de-stress.
When he gave that interview, Vance was a vocal anti-Trumper. What he couldn’t have expected then was that he would be tapped to become Trump’s running mate, that the old interview would be dredged up, and that his casual use of a standard right wing stereotype for liberal women would put him in the centre of a storm.
Perhaps the most followed personality in the US is a “cat lady” — to wit Taylor Swift, whose three pets Meredith Grey, Olivia Benson and Benjamin Button are almost as famous as Swift herself.
People magazine has profiled them, as has Cosmopolitan; a Forbes story talks of how Swift’s cats influenced the storyline of a movie; just one of them, Olivia Benson, is reportedly worth as much as Bollywood stars Ranbir Singh and Alia Bhatt put together; they have their own merchandise; and Benjamin Button made it to Time when he posed with Swift for the Time Person of the Year 2023 cover.
The singer has 283 million followers on Instagram to Trump’s 26 million, and 95.2 million followers on X to Trump’s 87.8 million — and that massive following has apparently decided to take a hand in the race.
Celebrities ranging from Bette Midler to model Ella Emhoff to ex-Friends Jennifer Aniston ripping into Vance was to be expected. Beyonce joining Swift to announce a series of fund-raising concerts for Harris was also not altogether surprising — though how she is going to fit that into an overcrowded concert schedule is a poser. The real problem for the Trump-Vance ticket is that the ‘Swifties’, as the singer’s fans call themselves, have jumped into the election feet first.
Word is that in every city, her fans are creating QR codes with links for voter registrations and donations, so you can do the democracy thing while dancing — in ‘Swifties for Harris’ t-shirts — to the chartbusting numbers that have converted the 34-year-old into an industry in her own right.
(Fun fact: Last year, the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia announced that Swift's concert in the state helped boost travel and tourism in the region, while a 2023 concert in State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona generated more revenue than that year’s Super Bowl held in the same stadium).
Just what the Trump campaign didn’t need: to have, ranged against him and his mostly middle-aged, supremacist, misogynistic camp followers, a country-sized band of energised, adrenalin-fuelled young people on a mission. (And that is without counting the young fans of singer/songwriter Charli XCX, who anointed Harris as brat.)
I was looking to give what I thought would be the most boring election campaign of a lifetime a total miss. Now, I just can’t look away.
Have a good weekend, all.
I’m intrigued by the following: How the polling numbers was favoring Trump, and still is being reported to be on balance within the margin of error, given the facts – about half being female voters, the direction of the red party has been aggressively taking since the Rove v Wade was reversed; a public health crisis was handled in terms of control and handling of the patients; the integrity and the ability of the candidates at the ticket.
Most of the excitement of the current change in the presidential race is from the younger, educated, and perhaps partisan crowd, but with the numbers you have mentioned about the followers in social media I was expecting to see a substantial change in the poll numbers, but all the political pundits are going about explaining a 2 to 4 percent change. So, I really don’t know what to make of those numbers and poll predictions in general.
The US presidential election has indeed become super exciting again. I realised what you meant by Swift’s cats being as popular as her when my daughter, who is a big Swifty, told me everything about them. What a world!