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On Thursday, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in Kerala launched a hectic exercise in damage control after news broke that the Manipur government had declared Easter Sunday a working day.
The party’s provincial leadership took pains to convince Christians, a crucial electoral bloc in Kerala, that the BJP-led Manipur government had declared the State holidays on Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
The BJP appeared worried that the episode might upend the party’s carefully calibrated outreach to the Church in Kerala, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi seemed to cap with a high-profile Christmas celebration for the top clergy at his official residence in New Delhi in 2023.
The electioneering “faux pax” lent ammunition to the Congress to assail the BJP.
Leader of the Opposition V.D. Satheesan said the Manipur government’s move was patently anti-Christian. He said the Christian tribal community in Manipur was living in fear. The State government had allowed armed ethnic violence overwhelmingly targeting the Christian minority to flare up.
Mr. Satheesan said the BJP’s veneer of secularism had cracked again. “BJP leaders in Kerala call on Church leaders with cakes and flowers. Manipur has proved again that they are like wolves turning up at the door dressed in sheep’s clothing,“ he said.
Mr. Satheesan said Prime Minister Narendra Modi never lost an opportunity to invite himself to Kerala. “Mr. Modi attends VIP weddings and revels in roadshows. But he has no time to heal the wounds of State-sponsored ethnic cleansing in Manipur,” he said.
The Church had aired a similar criticism through pastoral letters and editorials in its various mouthpieces as election campaigning gathered pace in the State.
Recently, a cleric raised concerns with the BJP leader and the party’s candidate from the Thrissur Lok Sabha constituency during one of the latter’s campaign stops at a local parish.
Discomfitingly for the BJP, a video clipping of the seemingly strained one-to-one video went viral on social media.
BJP’s Kerala in-charge Prakash Javadekar, posted on X (formerly Twitter) that the Manipur government declared the holidays on Good Friday and Easter Sunday. He challenged “Congress and Communists” to condemn the Islamist terror attacks in Israel and Russia.
BJP State president K. Surendran and Minister of State for Electronics and Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar said the INDIA bloc bid to stoke a controversy had turned a damp squib.
