Balasore mishap & Manipur horrors serve blows to ‘Brand Modi’
By Manish Anand
New Delhi, July 21: The Opposition is charged up in the ongoing session of Parliament. The constituents of the Opposition believe that they can deliver knocking blows to ‘Brand Modi’, the sole mascot for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the elections.
The first two days of the Monsoon session of Parliament have been washed out, with the Opposition not letting the lid slide over the heated Manipur issue. The Opposition has drawn a firm bottomline that the prime minister first make the statement and then only the issue can be taken up for discussion.
Evidently, the Opposition is sensing opportunities to expose the “infallibility” of ‘Brand Modi’ that the prime minister can make no mistake and that he’s the best custodian of the interests of the country. The inability of the ruling BJP to contain the ethnic violence, which is now approaching three months, is seemingly making the prime minister vulnerable.
In desperation to shield the only mascot of the saffron outfit, the BJP spin doctors are busy begging audience to generalize the Manipur horrors, which included parading of two Kuki-Zomi tribe women on May 4 and their alleged gangrape afterwards. Former Union Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad sought to fan the conspiracy theory that the social media circulation of the viral video from Manipur was timed with the commencement of the Monsoon session of Parliament.
On Friday, the BJP fielded the party MP Locket Chatterjee who sought to suggest that she was crying at the incidents of violence against women in West Bengal during the just concluded Panchayat elections. Leader of the Opposition in the West Bengal Assembly Suvendu Adhikari also peddled similar claims. However, his party colleague Dilip Ghosh has made contrasting claims that only a few pockets in the state had seen violence during the Panchayat polls.
The Balasore rail mishap involving three trains had robbed the sheen of the Modi model of governance, as it tumbled out that the KAWACH, the anti-collision device, was barely installed in single digit rail routes. Ministry of Railways sought to divert the blame by fanning conspiracy theory on sabotage, but officials of the transporter leaked that signaling malfunction was actually the culprit. The Balasore rail mishap denied the fanfare of the celebrations of the ninth anniversary of the Modi government.
With the tails up for the Congress after winning the Karnataka and Himachal Pradesh Assembly elections, the Opposition constituents apparently now find the grand old party a convenient ally in their battle against the Modi-led BJP. An avalanche of trolls, some banking on fake news of ANI for which the agency apologized after 18 hours for twisting a tweet of Manipur Police, and attempts to generalize the Manipur horrors clearly underline the discomfort in the saffron camp that their principal mascot is now in direct line of fire.
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