Shillong: Leaders of the North East Regional Political Front (NERPF) will meet in Guwahati on March 23 to finalize the strategy of the 10-party alliance in the northeast region for the coming Lok Sabha polls, NERPF convenor and Nagaland chief minister Neiphiu Rio said in Shillong on Saturday.
Rio attended during the day a general council meeting of UDP. Rio’s party Naga People’s Front (NPF) and UDP are both members of NERPF.
Addressing a news conference jointly with UDP working president Paul Lyngdoh, Rio said it would be discussed threadbare at the meeting if the NERPF would support NDA in the coming election.
“Any decision to support NDA would have to be taken in consultation with all the members of the alliance,” he said. “It has to be a decision of all the parties. If any member has any other suggestion to make, he can do that.”
NPF has, however, already leaned towards NDA.
In his recent visit to Delhi, Rio felicitated BJP’s prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi. At Saturday’s news conference, Rio castigated the UPA, terming the 1984 anti-Sikh riots as a worse communal carnage than the Gujarat riots.
He said, however, he had gone to meet BJP president Rajnath Singh who had promised that if BJP came to power it would solve the Naga issue. He would ask BJP to put it in the poll manifesto of the party.
It was unfortunate that the AGP and the BJP could not arrive at a seat-sharing deal in Assam, Rio said. He would try to convince the BJP national leadership to come to an understanding with AGP in some seats. Even then, Rio was confident that after the election members of NERPF would stick together and not go for separate post-poll alliances with different national-level parties.
He said the 10-party alliance would work out a joint election manifesto on the basis of a 17-point resolution which had been adopted during the formation of NERPF last October. Issues concerning the northeast region would be highlighted.
Among them were detection and deportation of Bangladeshi infiltrators, scrapping of Armed Forces Special Powers Act, constitutional safeguards for the indigenous people of the northeast, 80 per cent job reservation for the sons of the soil and implementation of the look east policy “in letter and spirit.”
Rio said an act like AFSPA had no place in a democratic society like India’s, as it bestowed on people in uniform draconian powers.
AFSPA had been designed for the Naga Hill areas in present Nagaland and Manipur to curb the political issue of the Nagas, but now the act was being used in different parts of the country.
Rio, who is the candidate for NPF in the Lok Sabha seat in Nagaland, said if voted to power he would try to facilitate in early solution of the Naga political issue.
Stating that the UPA government had shown no initiative at the political level to settle the issue in Nagaland, he said that in frustration the chief interlocutor R. S. Pandey in the talks with NSCN(I-M) had resigned.
“They have submitted their suggestions and are waiting for a reply. There has to be a reply, either yes or no.” The more the Naga issue would be dragged, the more complicated would it become, Rio warned.