Congress President, Sonia Gandhi has criticised the government for not giving due respect to the country's federal structure.
Congress President Sonia Gandhi today attacked Prime Minister Narendra Modi led National Democratic Alliance government for their "arrogance" by not taking the chief ministers of north-eastern states into confidence before signing the peace accord with the Nationalist Socialist Council of Nagaland (NSCN-IM) faction, an armed rebel group active in the north-eastern region.
The 68-year-old veteran also criticised the government for not giving due respect to the country's federal structure.
"From this I take that this government is arrogant... their arrogance is even more clear than it was before, it's an insult to the chief minister, not only to them, but also to the people of those states and federal structure of our country," Mrs Gandhi told reporters in Parliament.
According to the senior leader, PM Modi did call a few leaders including her to inform her of the accord, but found out later that chief ministers were not consulted.
Mrs Gandhi said, "When I called my chief ministers who are directly affected by this, I asked them. They were totally blank, no one even bothered to even brief them, perhaps not in detail but even in a wide kind of sense after all Chief Ministers of Manipur, Arunachal, Assam, are directly affected ,so what do I take from this?"
On Monday, the government signed an accord with the NSCN (IM), after nearly two decades of peace talks to end the country's oldest insurgency.
Under the broad framework of the peace settlement, the Naga leadership has given up its demand for integration of the Naga inhabited areas under one administration, and has accepted the primacy of the Indian Constitution, according to sources.
Apart from the states of Nagaland, Tripura and Sikkim, the Congress is in power in Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Mizoram and Meghalaya in the north-east.