Hours after Biren stepped aside as Manipur CM, Governor calls off Assembly session, Congress moves to claim credit
Hours after N Biren Singh stepped down as the Manipur Chief Minister, the Governor issued a notification on Sunday night declaring that the state legislative assembly will not convene tomorrow (February 10).
The notification declared the previous orders summoning the assembly “null and void”.
Biren’s decision to step down a day before the assembly session is significant given that the ruling BJP government was staring at a tough time in the House.
Hours after Biren’s resignation, senior Congress leader Jairam Ramesh wrote on X, “The Congress was all set to move a no-confidence motion against the Chief Minister and his Council of Ministers in the Manipur Assembly tomorrow. Sensing the climate, the Manipur CM has just resigned. This was a demand that the Congress has been making since early May 2023, when Manipur erupted.”
“The CM’s resignation was belated. The people of Manipur now await a visit by our Frequent Flier PM who is off to France and the USA now – and who has found neither the time nor the inclination to go to Manipur these past twenty months,” he wrote.
As reported, several state BJP leaders who have been upset with Biren’s leadership and the party-led Centre’s management of the Manipur crisis had again started putting pressure on the party leadership to remove him.
One of the dissident BJP MLAs from the valley, where the Meiteis are in the majority, had said, “For the last two years, neither the state leadership nor the Centre has come up with a roadmap for peace, and they are just diverting attention by saying that ‘we will seal the border’, ‘we will implement the NRC’ or ‘launch a war on drugs’. But the main issue is the restoration of peace and normalcy. We are saying that if there is no change in this before the Assembly session begins, something big and unprecedented will happen during the session.”
Another BJP MLA had said that “more than two-thirds of the BJP MLAs are not happy with the current leadership. So everyone is going to make some move in the interest of the public and the state. The turmoil is intolerable. We cannot wait anymore.”
