Manipur’s embattled Congress has won both the Lok Sabha seats in the state, defeating ruling allies BJP and NPF, with the mandate widely attributed to popular anger at the state and central governments' mishandling of the ethnic strife.
The Congress has won both Inner Manipur — covering the Meitei-dominated Imphal valley — and Outer Manipur, sprawling the hill districts where the Kuki-Zo and other tribal communities mostly live.
A. Bimol Akoijam, a JNU associate professor making his electoral debut, trounced state minister Th. Basanta Kumar Singh of the BJP by 109,801 votes in Inner Manipur.
Alfred Kanngam S. Arthur defeated the NPF’s Kachui Timothy Zimik by 85,418 votes in Outer Manipur. Arthur is from the Naga community that has remained neutral in the 13-month-old conflict between the Meiteis and the Kuki-Zos, which has left at least 227 people dead and displaced over 67,000 since May 3 last year.
Both the BJP and the NPF had replaced their sitting MPs.
The Congress had been in free fall in Manipur since losing power to the BJP-led alliance in 2017, and won just 5 of the 53 seats it contested in the 2022 Assembly elections with a vote share of 16.83 per cent. This general election, its vote share in the state shot up to 47.57 per cent.
The BJP’s vote share in Inner Manipur was 16.6 per cent, plummeting from the 37.83 per cent it had polled in 2022, when it won 32 of the state’s 60 Assembly seats.
A. Nirmala, general secretary of the Ema Market or the Mother’s Market, Asia’s largest women-run market and one of Imphal’s landmarks, told The Telegraph the results symbolised a "people’s victory".
"It’s a win for the people. There has been no solution to the ongoing unrest. So many people have died; livelihoods have been hit," she said.
She stressed that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had never visited the state since the unrest began and Union home minister Amit Shah, who did come in end-May last year, "was supposed to come again after 15 days" but did not.
"But he (Shah) came this year to campaign! Today’s mandate reflects the pent-up anger of the people of Manipur," Nirmala said.
She hoped that Bimol would raise Manipur’s issues in Parliament and get them addressed by the new government at the Centre.
Ravi Khan, vice-chairman of the state Congress legal department, too said the results were a "people’s victory" and "a mandate against" the central and state BJP governments' handling of the ethnic conflict.
Similar sentiments were expressed on the other side of the divide, in the hills.
Rev. L. Haokip from Kuki-Zo majority Churachandpur told this newspaper that the people of Manipur "as a whole do not approve of the way the BJP has handled the ongoing crisis".
The unrest has put the hills out of bounds for the Meiteis and the Imphal valley out of bounds for the Kuki-Zos.
