Modi may address India violence in no confidence vote

BLOOMBERG

Prime Minister Narendra Modi might address the deadly ethnic violence in northeast India before a no confidence vote brought by the opposition in an attempt to force a debate in a legislature dominated by his allies.
Modi won’t lose the parliamentary vote scheduled on Thursday as the coalition led by his Bharatiya Janata Party has a supermajority in the lower house.
The opposition is instead focusing on pressuring Modi on his government’s handling of the killings in remote Manipur state bordering Myanmar ahead of a national vote due by May 2024.
The prime minister is never far from the public eye with daily social media posts and trips to the US and Australia this year. But he has yet to fully address the ethnic clashes that left more than 150 people dead and displaced 50,000 people since May in Manipur — a state controlled by his party.
“This is going to be a battle of perception,” said Arati Jerath, a New Delhi-based political analyst who has written about Indian politics for nearly three decades.
“What the opposition is going to do in the no confidence motion is to put the BJP in the dock on a whole range of issues starting with complete administrative and law order failure in Manipur, which they feel is the result of BJP’s divisive policies,” she added.
Modi’s opponents say the Hindu-dominant BJP has made the South Asian country less tolerant of religious and ethnic minorities — with the recent spate of violence reinforcing this view. Clashes between Hindus and Muslims during a religious procession left seven people dead near New Delhi’s international airport.
Since taking power in 2014, Modi has come under fire for pushing a Hindu nationalist agenda and coming down hard on dissenting voices, including news organisations, NGOs and research groups.