Manipur News

It is depressing that today freight truck managing to reach the state capital has once again become material for front page news. A decade years ago, when the state government chose to implement the 5th Pay Commission recommendations for its employees without first getting the concurrence of the Central government, in the process going totally broke, it was the status of the state government’s bank balance with the Reserved Bank of India, RBI, which made headline news. RBI releasing funds for the state at the time had then come to be awaited eagerly by everybody in the state for it meant payment of government salaries. It is now unimaginable that at the time salaries for government employees were paid at intervals anywhere between three to six months. Anybody older than 15 years would remember what difficult times those were, with the markets acquiring a cadaveric hue, considering the biggest source for its liquidity was and still is the purchase power of salaried government employees. As always, the poor who had little or no credit worth were the hardest hit. Such things can only happen in Manipur. Here events and things which ought to be drearily normal and routine have become abnormal and conversely what would be considered abnormal anywhere in the world have become normal and everyday reality.

Now that the state is managing to maintain a healthier bank balance with the RBI and at least salaries for government employees are no longer the unbearable burden that it once was, there are other ordinary things which have taken their turns to acquire a grotesque visage, haranguing the ordinary citizenry once again. Essential commodities are beginning to disappear from the shop shelves, so have the petrol pumps dripped dry, prices are skyrocketing, and amidst all this government heads are either playing their fiddles unabashed, or else frantically and quixotically shadow boxing as if it believes this is enough to convince the people it means action. The twin economic blockade along the state’s lifelines by those demanding as well as opposing the proposed creation of SADAR hill district has come to rudely upset life in the state, bringing back the unfortunate reality of routine events turning into nightmares. And so, trucks movement along the highways have been transformed into headlines material. How much more pathetic can the situation get, and more importantly, how much longer is the government simply going to wait and watch this mounting misery unfold in the life of the state?

The contrast is rather uncanny. But if the routine can become abnormal in Manipur, so can many shockingly abnormal events also get reduced to the mundane. Visitors to the state would vouch this is so. They are bewildered at how ordinary citizens tolerate so many overwhelming but avoidable odds in daily life. Imagine this is a state where electric power for domestic consumption is available for only four hours a day; piped municipal water likewise is available to consumers for as little as an hour on alternate days; black toppings on city and country roads get washed away every monsoon. Broken roads mean mud during the wet seasons and dust during the dry. It is anybody’s guess what health implications this would have on the citizenry. Yet everybody seems to have come to accept all this as normal in a frustratingly fatalistic way. No accountability is ever fixed for all these failures and equally, no accountability is ever sought by the public for any of these either. The notion of citizen’s rights has been so badly skewed that today only the crassest violations seem to qualify to be called infringements. So while the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, AFSPA, is seen as the overbearing state breathing down neck of the ordinary men and women, health hazards posed by scarcity of safe drinking water or the omnipresent cloud of dust hanging above the roads in the state is seen as nothing to be so upset about. The threshold of concern has indeed been pushed up extremely high and only unnatural and violent deaths and injuries are seen as threat to life and dignity of the people. This raised threshold is dangerous, for it will end up a excusing a whole range of nuanced and not so nuanced atrocities by authorities given charge of the affairs of the state. It is time for the ordinary people to be sensitised on their rights that go beyond the loud and overt. In the end, it is coming to grip with all these rights, and not just the obvious, which is going to define the quality of life for everybody in the state.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2011/09/topsy-turvy-manipur/

Something is just not right in the manner the blockades on the highways have been allowed to carry on with the government doing precious little. By indicating in the manner that it is helpless in dealing with the situation, the government is sending out very wrong messages to the people by and large. To the docile the message is they should resign and hope and pray for the best to come on its own. This is hardly the kind of attitude to be encouraged by any forward thinking government or for matter anybody in the position of guardianship, be it at the family level or else the larger society. To the aggressive, the message would be radically different. It would almost be a license for them to take the law into their own hands at any time they wish and arm-twist the government into submission and thereby concede to whatever they wish to have. This latter reading of the message is a sure recipe for a never ending chain of street politics aimed at coercing the public and by a relayed delivery system the same coercive message would also reach the government.

As a matter of fact, this grotesque cycle of subversion is what has already taken roots in Manipur. By its very inaction, the government has been encouraging practically everybody, including students’ bodies, to develop an unhealthy sense of controlling and possessing State power, disproportionate to what civilised norms envisaged by the democratic polity, as legitimate. Hence, insurgent groups are de facto parallel government, issuing their own decrees, levying their own taxes, raising their own military etc, but even if this phenomenon needs a far more sophisticated response, what is beyond understanding is, what is keeping the government from controlling what it is mandated to control and what is very much within its power to do so? Why cannot it take the law in its own hands and not leave it up to the whim of every so called civil society organisation to dictate terms of how and by what norms the people should be governed. We are not talking about civil society bodies which lobby or resist government policies in the positive belief that the government’s will is not rigid, and provided it is made to see reason to the contrary of how it sees policy matters at any given time it can be made to alter or even drop these policies. We instead have in mind the mutant versions of civil society bodies which have come to believe they are the government and can not only make laws but also enforce them with violence. Should not civil society bodies be actually civil in nature and limit themselves to just challenging the government in civilised norms. What we get to see when this unwritten norm is crossed is what we are seeing today – virtual lawlessness.

The current blockade scenario is increasingly turning out to be another case of this state of lawlessness and the worst part of it is the government is apparently not taking any positive step to resolve the matter. It seems to be saying that indecision is also a conscious decision. Such an interrogation of set ideas would have made fine material for absorbing postmodern coffee house academic discussions, but in matters of the hard and brutal politics of the state, such an attitude is threatening to leave everybody, especially children belonging to below poverty line families, suffer from malnutrition. In the worst case scenario, it could end up accentuating or fomenting communal hostilities. So why is the government not swinging into action. True the situation is not easy and indeed would be akin to a Hobson’s choice as a decision either way would earn the ire of one or the other group advocating or opposing the idea of the creation of a separate SADAR Hills district. But although it is a truism that uneasy lies the head that wears the crown, the chief minister has no other choice but to exercise his own judgment on what the right decision should be and take it. At this moment, the most immediate need is to secure free, open and safe passage on all the national highways that connect the state to the rest of the country. One is reminded of a junior school textbook parable of a farmer and his son who went to the market riding their donkey and in trying to please everybody by doing what they presumed would please each of them, ultimately ended up carrying their donkey instead of riding it. The moot point is, the government must do whatever it needs to do to have the highways opened up totally, be it by reaching a settlement with the agitators or else using the power in the state’s command. If it is abjectly unable to accomplish this legitimate function of the state, it must voluntarily abdicate its position and make way for a spell of President’s Rule in the state to tackle the situation.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2011/09/indecision-as-decision/

September 9 is already going down in history as one of the darkest day of human civilisation. This the day many paradigms of basic humanity changed so dramatically and drastically. Not the least important of these is the paradigm of human conflict. Regardless of what has been said of America or the Capitalist ideology which drives the country, basic humanity was compromised in a big way on this day when fundamentalist Islamists hijacked four planes in the USA and attacked and destroyed some of America’s most important symbols killing close to 3000 innocent civilians in the process. Of the four plane hijacked, two destroyed the famous World Trade Centre buildings in New York city, one rammed into the Pentagon building near Washington DC and the third crashed somewhere in Maryland, but according to experts, was probably headed for the White House. Apparently some passengers in the last plane got into action fighting the hijackers, in the process crashed the plane. Although they did not manage to save themselves, they prevented further damage to the American morale, thereby died heroes’ deaths in their own ways. The event on the day shook not just America, but also the rest of the world and indeed it was to have grave consequence on everybody else in the world, in particular two countries, Afghanistan and Iraq, which bore the brunt of the ire of the richest and the most powerful country in the world. National regimes in these two countries were dismantled in the most brutal and violent ways by invading Americans. What was a black day for America was soon to become the black era for many other nations. Pakistan and Indonesia to name just a few were also to soon feel the heat in big ways.

While there can be no dispute about the attackers of America on September 11, 2001 were making Afghanistan their stronghold, America’s retaliation against Iraq and the ultimate hanging of the President of the country, Saddam Hussein, remains a big controversy. The excuse for that attack was that Saddam’s regime was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction meant ultimately to be used to create terror in the world and that the country was in league with the Al Qaeda the organisation behind the attack on America. Nearly a decade after the invasion of Iraq, there are still no traces of any weapons of mass destruction found in the country. In the end, Iraq is turning out to be a country, the centre of the ancient Mesopotamian civilisation, a mistaken victim of the America’s and those of its Western allies’ unfounded suspicion. Can history ever excuse this mistake or highhandedness as the case may be?

But the event which has today come to be simply known as 9/11 has had other profound influences on the way the world conducts its business. It cannot be all by coincidence that while America remains extremely sensitive and as well as unable to come out of extremely expensive wars that it waged in the wake of 9/11, other thus far sleeping economic and military giants have not just begun stirring but also to wake up to prepare to change the power and economic equations in the world forever. China is leading the way, so are India, Brazil and Russia among others, making big headways. Once moribund economies of South East Asia too have begun making their presence felt, and Vietnam in particular is growing at a rate that would in another decade put it above many much larger nations of the world in terms of economic strength. At the end of the Cold War in the last decade of the 20th Century, marked most dramatically by the fall of the Berlin Wall and then the crumbling of the Communist bastions in Eastern Europe, most political analysts around the world had come to be convinced and some to lament, that the world was headed to become a uni-polar one with the USA as the only power centre. In just a matter of a decade into the 21st Century, this popular prediction is proving to be nothing but too far from what the picture ultimately would be. It is not even a bi-polar world as during the Cold War, but a multi-polar one we are looking at now. Indeed 9/11 is proving to have much more significance than apparent. To indulge in a bit of counterfactual speculation then, the interesting question now is, if the cataclysmic event had not occurred, would the world today have been the same? Would what Newsweek Magazine often described as “the rise of the others” been as pronounced as it is today. Again, the concept of war and conflict has been rewritten. Except for the USA which is in the thick of it, wars of nations are increasingly becoming a thing of the past. The new wars are against terrorism most visibly, but perhaps more importantly, though not acknowledged so readily by many of the richest nations, issues like global warming and shortfall of food to feed the ever increasing human population etc.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2011/09/black-september/