Ripping off the BJP-led Centre’s “whataboutery and false equivalences”, Trinamul Congress MP Mahua Moitra’s spirited defense of the no-confidence motion in the Lok Sabha entailed why the horror situation in Manipur is “different” from the rest of the country. The motion, Moitra maintained, was, simultaneously, also about breaking the stranglehold of a “Tum Abhi Chup Raho Republic'' imposed on voicing of opinions by the nation’s ruling dispensation.

Moitra, of course, dragged media attention even before she set foot inside the House for her eight-minute speech, beginning her day with her characteristically pithy statement on public broadcaster Sansad TV’s air time controversy and highlighting her bright attire. “Am supposed to speak today. Am wearing a bright pink & green saree just in case shameless biased @sansad_tv focuses elsewhere during my speech,” she tweeted with a picture of her at the Parliament premises.

“We are here to ask questions in a Tum Abhi Chup Raho Republic where the Prime Minister tells a Governor Chup Raho (shut up), where we as elected MPs in this house are routinely told Chup Raho,” stated Moitra at the start of her speech, adding “The motion is to break this omerta, the code of silence about Manipur, the most pressing issue of the day where we are all supposed to Raho Chup.”

“The Manipur issue is mired in silence and in the government’s whataboutery and false equivalences. Treasury bench members have made oblique references to why only Manipur? What about rapes and murders in Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal. We, in turn, have been compelled to ask what about the violence in Haryana? Manipur is different, and I’ll tell you why,” the MP introduced the crux of her argument.

“The issue of Manipur is one of hate crime against a particular community where it is understood that police personnel of one community, possibly the same community as the chief minister, handed over women of another community to be raped and pillaged by a mob and made every attempt those women from seeking justice. The issue in Manipur today is that two communities have been pitted against each other in an atmosphere of civil war of ethnic violence that has rarely been seen in India in the past few decades,” she stated.

Responding to the comparisons made between the strife-torn north-eastern state and troubled spots in the rest of the country, the Krishnanagar MP said: “6500 FIRs in three months; 4000 houses destroyed; 60,000 people – 2 percent of the state’s population – displaced; 150 people dead, 300 places of worship destroyed. Which state has seen this?”

“An armed stand off between the Manipur state police and the Assam Rifles captured on video, one controlled by the ministry of home affairs and the other by the state, 5000 firearms and six lakh bullets looted from police stations by mobs. Two ethnic groups armed to the teeth, a buffer zone where the hill cannot go the valley and the valley cannot go to the hill, a chief minister supports one group and accuses the other of being a drug runner when in truth over 50,000 acres of poppy have increased in cultivation over the past five years and 250 square kilometers of forest land have reduced under this CM’s watch. Which state has seen these? Only Manipur, no other state,” she continued.

The MP went on to state: “We haven’t heard about one change in the police force, in the government. We haven’t heard of one person taking responsibility. As a government in the Centre which is also ruling Manipur, this is your biggest failure of the double-engine sarkar. Manipur is a tacitly approved hate crime.”

“In Manipur, BJP’s majoritarian bravado is destroying a state and tearing apart its people. If the PM is listening, I beg you on behalf of the people of Manipur, change the administration, allow all parties to work together to mediate a truce. Otherwise, even after your term ends India will echo in one voice as to what went so terribly wrong in Manipur with such terrible consequences for our country,” Moitra appealed.

“India has lost confidence in you (PM Modi). The spectacle of the prime minister of the greatest democracy bowing to religious Seers of a majority in the chamber of the new Parliament fills us with shame, police manhandling and filing FIRs against champion wrestlers fills us with shame, 50 Panchayat in 3 districts of BJP-ruled Haryana issuing letters forbidding Muslim traders entering the state fills us with shame,” the MP’s emotional outburst in Parliament was greeted with applause from colleagues in the opposition benches as well as loud protests from their government counterparts.

Quoting The Gita and stating “You have the rights to labour only and not to its fruits’, Moitra’s concluding words were: “Everyone asks if not Modiji then who? After this inaction on Manipur PM where you had absolute power to intervene but did not, is a cornerstone after which India will say, "anyone but Modi.”