Prime Minister ignores demand for withdrawal of his remarks against Kerala

Thiruvananthapuram: Prime Minister Narendra Modi has failed to give any response to widespread criticism of his remarks comparing Kerala to Somalia in his address at the election rally in Tripoonithura on Wednesday.

Chief Minister Oommen Chandy and others had demanded that the Prime Minister should withdraw the remarks made in his speech at the election rally in Thiruvananthapuram on Sunday. There were also widespread protests in the social media against Mr. Modi’s remark.

Mr. Modi had said that the infant mortality rate among tribals in Kerala was higher than that of Somalia. He had also mentioned a reported instance of children belonging to the Paniya tribe eating from a waste dump and criticised that political murders were not being properly investigated.

The Chief Minister denied these noting that an enquiry had found that the reported incident of children eating food from waste dump had been found wrong upon enquiry. No child ate stale food in Kerala. He recalled that the State government had successfully prosecuted those involved in the T. P. Chandrasekharan murder case. Though a CBI enquiry was sought into the larger conspiracy in the cases of murder of Chandrasekharan as well as the murder of BJP leader K. T. Jayakrishnan, the Centre had not given a positive response.

Meanwhile, the hashtag #PoMoneModi was trending on Twitter with many describing Mr. Modi comparison of Kerala to Somalia as an insult to Kerala. The Twitter campaign mostly sarcastic of Mr. Modi apparently did much harm for Mr. Modi’s campaign for NDA in Kerala. Yet, there was no response from Modi on Twitter either. (PoMoneModi roughly translates into go my boy, Modi with a dismissive and sarcastic connotation.)

It has been pointed out that the infant mortality rate of general population in Kerala was only 12 per 1000 live births against national average of 40 (2013 figures). It was 36 in Gujarat State which was ruled by Mr. Modi. In Somalia, it was 137. The infant mortality rate among tribals in the worst affected Wayanad district of Kerala was 28.97 per 1000 live births (2008-2009 figure).