New Delhi: Targeting the upcoming election season in the northeast, Prime Minister Narendra Modi is embarking on a day-long visit to two of the northeastern states on Tuesday - Manipur and Tripura. The prime minister is expected to inaugurate development projects worth over Rs.5,000 crores in these two states. The Assembly election in Manipur is due early this year, while Tripura is going to elections in 2023.
The prime minister will inaugurate and lay foundation stones of 22 projects worth around Rs.4,800 crores in Manipur. He is also scheduled to inaugurate the newly built state of the art Integrated Terminal Building of Maharaja Bir Bikram Airport in state capital Agartala, built at a cost of about Rs 450 crore.
He will also launch Project Mission 100 of Vidyajyoti Schools, which is aimed to improve the quality of education in the state by converting 100 existing high/higher secondary schools to Vidyajyoti Schools with state of art facilities and quality education. This educational project is likely to cover about 1.2 lakh students from nursery to class XII and will cost around Rs.500 crores in next three years.
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Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is eyeing to repeat its success in Manipur and Tripura where the saffron party stormed to power for the first time in 2017 and 2018 respectively. The Prime Minister's visit to the two election bound states in the region particularly assumes significance considering the fact that there has been a strong resentment against the saffron party recently over the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA).
While the BJP had been able succeed in Manipur in 2017 and hoping to better its performance in the elections this year, the recent incident of massacre of the 14 Naga civilians at Oting in Nagaland by the Assam Rifles troopers might also come as a hurdle in the 19 assembly segments in the Manipur hills, which are dominated by the Naga tribes and Kukis.
Anti-AFSPA movement gains momentum
The massacre of 14 civilians at Oting in Nagaland's Mon district on December 4 have led to a fresh agitation against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), that gives sweeping powers to the Indian army to carry out operations and arrest anyone without a warrant, enter or search a premises without a warrant, and prohibit the possession of firearms. The massacre at Oting gave a fresh momentum to the anti-AFSPA movement in the northeastern states.
While most of the states demanded repeal of AFSPA, students' bodies and civil society organisations in the northeastern states even took to the streets demanding immediate repeal of the draconian act. The recent extension of the Act to the whole of Nagaland declaring it as a 'disturbed area' has also infuriated the Nagas in the region.
Apart from the resentment against the BJP over the AFSPA, the BJP is also probably seeing a threat in Tripura, where the Mamata Banerjee led Trinamool Congress is trying to make inroads riding on its success against the saffron party in the West Bengal elections. TMC, which is trying to spread its wings in different parts of the country, has said that it will fight the assembly polls in Goa and Tripura.
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