After Congress & Left, now Trinamool says it will raise Manipur issue in Parliament

Imphal/Kolkata, July 10 After the Congress and Left parties, the Trinamool Congress is also likely to raise the issue of ethnic violence in Manipur at the Monsoon Session of the Parliament starting July 20.

Trinamool will send a five-member delegation led by its Rajya Sabha member Derek O'Brien to trouble-torn Manipur on Friday to take stock of the situation in the northeastern state, which has been under the grip of violent ethnic clashes between non-tribal Meitei and tribal Kuki communities for around 70 days now.

Trinamool’s Rajya Sabha member Sushmita Dev, who is also one of the members of the delegation, said the team will try to talk to a cross section of people belonging to different communities, besides those housed in the relief camps.

“After learning the ground situation and obtaining the views and reactions of the affected people, we will raise the issue in the forthcoming session of the Parliament,” Dev told IANS over phone.

Other members of the Trinamool delegation include the party's Rajya Sabha member Dola Sen, and Lok Sabha members Kalyan Banerjee and Kakoli Ghosh Dastidar.

In a press communique issued in Kolkata, the Trinamool also accused the BJP and the Union government of doing nothing to bring the situation under control and give healing touch to the people of Manipur.

Party sources in Kolkata said that the decision to send the delegation to Manipur has been taken by party supremo and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.

Interestingly, the decision came just an hour after news surfaced that the BJP has decided to send a four-member central fact-finding team to West Bengal to review the situation amid large-scale violence over the rural civic body polls, which has already claimed 39 lives since the announcement of polling date on June 8.

The four-member central delegation of the BJP that is expected to reach Kolkata on Wednesday includes former Union minister Ravishankar Prasad, ex-Commissioner of Mumbai Police Satyapal Singh, and party MPs Rajdeep Roy and Rekha Verma.

The central delegation will visit the different violence-hit areas of the state and is expected to interact with the local people there, especially the family members of the victims.

The Trinamool leadership has questioned the decision to send a central delegation to West Bengal, pointing out that the BJP did not send any central team to Manipur, which is burning for over two months now.

Earlier, the Congress and the Left parties’ delegations had visited Manipur.

Accompanied by Congress General Secretary K.C. Venugopal and AICC in-charge of several northeastern states, Ajoy Kumar, Congress leader Rahul Gandhi visited Manipur on June 29-30. The delegation visited several districts and talked to the people belonging to different communities.

The ethnic violence in Manipur, which broke out after a tribal organisation held a rally on May 3 opposing the recognition of the Meitei community as Scheduled Tribe, so far has claimed over 150 lives and injured more than 600 people.

In view of the ethnic strife in Manipur, approximately 50,650 men, women and children belonging to different communities have been displaced and are now sheltered in 350 camps set up in schools, government buildings and auditoriums.

--IANS