Modi’s NE visit

Narendra Modi’s two-day trip to Assam and Arunachal Pradesh on Saturday and Sunday will probably be his last visit to the region in the capacity of Prime Minister before the Lok Sabha elections are announced. This visit by the Prime Minister is significant from quite a number of angles. In one, he unveiled a slew of developmental projects and welfare programmes for the Northeastern region. Two, he particularly inaugurated the Sela tunnel project in Arunachal Pradesh, a long-pending infrastructure that has put in fast-lane military mobility and logistics support for deployed forces in the strategic Tawang sector of the China border. Three, he unveiled a towering statue of Lachit Barphukan, architect of the Assamese’s victory in the Battle of Saraighat in 1671, one that signalled the downfall of the so-called mighty Mughal empire. As reported, the Prime Minister, in this brief trip, unveiled projects worth Rs 55,600 crore covering almost all states of the Northeast on Saturday. While the projects for Assam were unveiled at a function held at Jorhat in Assam, the remaining projects covering Manipur, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Sikkim, Tripura, and Arunachal Pradesh were unveiled at a programme in Itanagar. Arunachal Pradesh, once the most-neglected state of the country, alone was gifted development projects worth more than 41,000 crore.  This included laying the foundation stone for the Dibang Multipurpose Hydropower Project in the Lower Dibang Valley district, which will be built at a cost of Rs 31,875 crore. It will be the highest dam structure in the country. What is also significant is that he handed over houses to close to six lakh poor people across the region constructed under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana. In Assam, the unveiling of the Lachit Barphukan statue at Jorhat has several significances. For instance, it has once again put in the minds of the people of the nation that the Northeast too had played a very big role in the making of modern India from the mediaeval era itself, with the great Ahom General alone leading an army that had inflicted the most crushing defeat on the supposedly invincible Mughal army on the Brahmaputra in Guwahati. While the Assamese pride has increased with the unveiling of this statue, Assam has now got another place of pilgrimage, which would also attract tourists from all over as they travel from Kaziranga to Sivasagar. The Prime Minister’s visit to Kaziranga itself is very important. It has been stated that Modi is the first Prime Minister to have visited Kaziranga since it was declared a National Park.