Reiterating their demand for a Union Territory carved out from Manipur, 10 MLAs from the Kuki-Zo tribes held a sit-in protest in Delhi on Tuesday and submitted a memorandum to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, seeking his intervention to stop the violence in the state, which began in May 2023.
The 10 Kuki-Zo MLAs, including seven from the BJP, held the sit-in-protest at Jantar Mantar. They said a separate administration in the form of a Union Territory with its own legislature is the only solution to the ethnic strife in Manipur.
Criticising the delay in holding a dialogue with Kuki-Zo insurgents’ umbrella groups such as the United Peoples’ Front and Kuki National Organisation, the 10 MLAs said, “We condemn attempts to create divisions within our people by the proposals to discontinue the Suspension of Operations with select armed groups.”
Their memorandum to the Prime Minister also said, “Apart from the prolonged and chronic discrimination towards the hill districts in matters of development by the successive Meitei majoritarian state governments, it is sad to see the discrimination being worsened in this time of the conflict for the last 19 months.”
“The Manipur government had failed to recommend and deliberately left out the affected hill districts for funding of central financial assistance under ‘PM-DevINE’ for the project providing Super Speciality and Assured Speciality Health Care in remote and hill districts (infrastructure and equipment) in Manipur,” it said.
The 10 tribal MLAs also urged the central government to directly fund development projects in the districts predominantly inhabited by the Kuki-Zo tribes.
