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India's communists call on Modi to meet delegation from war-torn Manipur

INDIAN communists called on Prime Minister Narendra Modi today to meet a delegation from the crisis-wracked state of Manipur that has been waiting in Delhi for an audience since June 15.

Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury met the delegation on Monday and urged the central government to act against over a month of violence in the north-eastern state, which has killed at least 98 people and left hundreds injured.

The immediate task in Manipur is to restore peace, but the causes of the ethnic and religious clashes must then be addressed, Mr Yechury said.

The CPI-M says that the state’s Hindu chauvinist BJP government helped pave the way for the clashes by “ordering large-scale evictions of people in the hill areas in the name of forest protection.”

Fighting began when a “solidarity march” by minority tribes opposing a proposal to register the region’s mainly Hindu Meitei ethnic majority as a scheduled tribe — which would cancel out positive discrimination advantages enjoyed by the minority groups — came under attack on May 3.

Meitei gangs then launched a wave of arson attacks on homes and churches belonging to the mainly Christian Kuki-Zomi tribes. The CPI-M accuses the BJP administration of being slow to act in defence of the non-Hindu communities, though it has pointed out that there are BJP representatives among the 10-party state delegation being snubbed by Mr Modi.

The Indian prime minister — himself widely held responsible for bloodly anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in 2002, when he was the western’s state chief minister — has remained silent on the clashes in Manipur and left on a state visit to the United States today.

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