Mizoram governor’s sacking is BJP’s latest misstep in a state it is trying to woo

· by

When Bharatiya Janata Party president Amit Shah makes his planned visit to Mizoram this month, officials of his organisation’s state unit have arranged for him to meet with church elders and receive a memorandum from them. Their note will remind the BJP that “India is a secular state, that the people of Mizoram are against the beef ban, and that we protest the anti-conversion bill”, said a senior official in the party’s Aizawl office.

The memo, which challenges some of the Sangh Parivar’s most prized axioms, is the brainchild of the party’s own state unit. A senior party leader contacted church elders and asked them to prepare it. Mizoram, which is 85% Christian has long been wary of the BJP’s Hindutva preoccupations. Party leaders were hoping that the Modi effect will neutralise some of that suspicion. However, recent steps by the BJP have made matters worse.

The latest source of anger for the state’s people is the sacking of Mizoram governor Aziz Qureshi on Saturday. He is the sixth governor to leave the state since the Modi government took charge in May. He was the second governor to be sacked – after Kamla Beniwal.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.