Tag: Articles-Opinions

By B.G. Verghese

Preoccupation with trivia over the forthcoming Indian elections, where tamasha has largely replaced serious and meaningful electoral debate, has deflected media attention from unfolding developments in Crimea.  The Crimean peninsulawas always culturally and demographically Russian and home to its strategic Black Sea Fleet. But it became part of Ukraine in 1991 on the basis of the then administrative boundaries when the Soviet Union broke up.

Latterly, with that country facing an economic crisis and the West encouraging Ukraine to join the European Union, the pro-Russian President of the Ukraine, Yunukovych, was overthrown by a Western-aided movement for regime change. Alarmed by this attempt further to unbalance Russia strategically and economically by extending NATOs tentacles deep into Russia’s Eurasian heartland, Putin struck. Crimea was militarily occupied and a referendum conducted that voted for reunion with Russia. The West has threatened sanctions and a new cold war looms on the horizon.

The West may huff and puff but its own policies in erstwhile Yugoslavia, Kosovo, Iraq, Libya, Syria and Afghanistan have been self-serving. Russia is seeking to build a Eurasian Economic Union to rebuild its strategic and economic clout as a counterpoise to the European Union.  The West sees this as restoring the Soviet Union in another guise and is out to prevent any such consummation. India understands Russia’s interest in Crimea and has pleaded for diplomatic rather than more muscular responses. This country has strong reason to want to have Russia as a strategic counterweight against US unilateralism, often dressed up as upholding democracy and righteousness.

This American tendency to press its own interests in the guise of some higher principle of freedom and fair competition is evident in its recent onslaught on Indian pharma competitors. US firms would like to make marginally incremental changes in molecules earlier developed bythem to claim new patents and thereby keep out competition, especially from developing counties like India that have been able to make similar formulations at a fraction of the monopoly price of the original vendor to the enormous benefit of poor patients in the Third World and among less affluent sections of society elsewhere. India is acting within the WTO parameters for TRIPS (Trade Related Intellectual Property Rights) and is not in violation of international norms.

The same unilateralism is to be seen in the Anglo-US led effort to discipline Sri Lanka in the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva on March 28 through a resolution calling for the establishment of what the British Foreign Secretary calls an “international mechanism” to address past violations of international law “and secure meaningful progress on a political settlement, accountability, human rights and reconciliation”.  

On the same day that the British Foreign Secretary wrote this article in the Hindu (March 17), the same newspaper carried an article by John Vidal from the Guardian. Vidal reported the setting up of a committee by HMG to see whether it is feasible to resettle 1000 (to 5000)Chagos Islanders who were expelled from the archipelago some half-century ago to lease the largest island, Diego Garcia, to the US as a strategic air, naval and submarine base from where the Americans have fought major illegal wars in an effort to bomb and bludgeon Indo-China, Iraq, Afghanistan and others to submission. The deceit and deception underpinning these wars make a disgraceful story.

The forced and crude expulsion of the Chagos Islanders was an illegal act of cultural genocide and found to be so but continues to be defended on the most callous, absurd and dishonest grounds. To prevent the right of return of the Chagossians, the Islands were declared a precious ecological and marine reserve in 2010 that would sink were the native population to return even as 5000 US military personnel live there and B-52 bombers thunder down runways.  If returning Chagossians fish in the archipelago’s clear waters this could endanger the species, but the US military is licenced to catch 50 tonnes of fish for sport! The utter hypocrisy and humbug of its all!  And these are the people preaching virtue to Sri Lanka and others. This is not to defend any wrongdoing by Sri Lanka or anybody else, but to argue for elementary standards of decency and integrity in international relations and in defending something as precious as human rights.  

Meanwhile at home, the nomination of candidates for the elections, across parties, has degenerated into the rounding up of criminals, thugs and dubious party hoppers on all sides. Small cabals are in charge of ticket distribution and old loyalties have ceased to matter. The BJP has treated Advani and Jaswant Singh badly through opaque selection procedures. It was strange to see NarendraModi’s nomination from Varanasi delayed until the last and then to find him nominated from a second seat in Vadodara. Contesting from two seats may be legal but is a questionable practice. What is the man seeking? Insurance? And should he win from both seats, he must sacrifice one. Advani too wanted to abandon his Gandhinagar seat in favour of Bhopal. What is he afraid of? Neither Modi nor Advani, like Mulayam,is interested in representing a constituency but wish only to ensure his own victory.  These are hollow men. The Congress eyeing the Ordinance route to announce anational women’s university to be set up in Rae Bareli, Sonia Gandhi’s constituency and to be named after Indira Gandhi,marks another new low in small time politics. Why now?

Finally, much was sought to be made of the leaked First Part of the Henderson-Brooks Report on the 1962 fiasco. This is by now old hat though the Defence Ministry is pretending to defend some great strategic secret by keeping the rest of it under wraps! There is nothing to hide other than the shame of supreme political folly. When will we ever learn?

www.bgvrghese.com

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2014/03/double-talk-double-dealing/

By Amar Yumnam

“Das Gute, dieser Satz steht fest, ist stets das Bose, was man lasset”. This is what Wilhelm Busch said meaning that not doing the bad amounts to goodness. Busch was a powerful satirist in the later part of nineteenth century Germany. This is quoted in an article in the Ecological Economics, I have just read, of Manfred Max-Neef titled “The good is the bad that we don’t do. Economic crimes against humanity: A proposal”. Max-Neef is a former Vice Chancellor of Universidad Austral de Chile and now Director of the Economics Institute.

Max-Neef has been a powerful exponent of the need for a reorientation of Economics as well as the development policies in the developing countries. While in the latest article he emphasises the necessity for discontinuing doing the bad, something like this approach needs, I feel, to be done in the context of governance in this country. The issues of corruption and governance have been the biggest issues in recent years in this country. The forthcoming parliamentary elections too are being fought mainly on these issues. The talks of women-empowerment and caring for the downtrodden by Rahul Gandhi have failed to appeal to the electorate of the country. Rather the articulations on corruption and governance of the BJP and the Aam Aadmi Party have caught the imagination of the people in the country.

At this juncture, the country needs to doubly ponder why the talk of the important agenda of empowerment of women and improving the livelihood of the poor are not as appealing to the populace as those of corruption and governance. We have history of the development experience and the effectiveness or rather otherwise on the delivery of development programmes since the beginning of planning in this country. The continuous lapses on the delivery front of development programmes have been the unexpressed grudge of the people for long but with little opportunity for assertion of the feelings by the population. The big exposures on corruption scams in recent years and the large scale exposure on crony capitalism wherein a few closed to the government became strikingly rich within short periods have definitely played a role in the new articulations and new political winds blowing in this country. In the latest issue of The Economist, corruption in India is given as the cause of the decline in recent growth performance and worsening relationship between private sector and the state: “Corruption produces bad decisions; concern over corruption produces indecision. Graft does not function, as some claim that it does elsewhere, as an unseemly but expedient market solution to inert bureaucracy, greasing the seized-up wheels of industry. It has put grit in those wheels. Loans to industries with graft problems have infected the largely-state-run banking syste; at least a tenth of its loans are sour. Inept cronies have messed up vital road and power projects. Mines and other assets lie idle as courts dither over how crooked their owners are……Few senior people go to jail; but officials fear being accused of malfeasance, so many think the safest course of action is to make no decisions at all”.  

Now why crony capitalism became a characteristic of the Indian Polity? This is where we should be finding the cause of the disease. In order to dig into this, we need to define two things – one is cause and another is interest. In usual discussions, we usually treat the two as synonymous. We thought doing something in the national interest is the same as performing something for the cause of the nation. But we can no longer treat these two as synonymous. The synonymous treatment of the two over the decades has been exploited as convenient frame for the emergence of crony capitalism in this country. Further the imperative for serving the cause has been made subservient to serving the interests. Unfortunately the cause and the interest here belong to different entities. While everything of the development interventions has been meant to serve the cause of the nation and the cause of the people, the interests have been all for the powers that be and those who are close to them. The cause of the country and the people and the interests have parted ways to such an extent that the cause easily became a sacrificial component in functioning while the interests could in no case be compromised.  This has been allowed to continue far too long and has reached the limit.

The forthcoming parliamentary elections give the people of the country an opportunity to define in clear terms the two concepts of cause and interest in the Indian context. We have to decide as ultimate determinants of state power as to whether we stand for the cause of the land and people or we stand for personal interests. If we opt for the first the outcome of interventions would be widely shared. On the other hand, if we opt for the later, the result of the development interventions would be monopolised by a few as so far. While serving the interests cannot attend to the purposes of the cause, serving the cause can accommodate the interest of all. Now is the moment to decide which one we stand for collectively in this democracy.  

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2014/03/cause-vs-interests-cause-and-interests-and-only-interests-and-no-cause-the-issues-facing-the-country-today/

By Peter Bosshard

“We find that even before accounting for negative impacts on human society and environment, the actual construction costs of large dams are too high to yield a positive return”, a new report states. “Large dams also take inordinately long periods of time to get built, making them ineffective in resolving urgent energy crises.” Simply put, dams don`t just destroy the environment and impoverish local communities. They also don`t make economic sense.

The new report was prepared by researchers from Oxford University and is based on the most comprehensive economic analysis of large dams ever undertaken. The peer-reviewed scientific study offers a devastating verdict on the economics of large dams, and has important implications for future energy sector planning.

Over four years, the authors of the new study –  Atif Ansar, Bent Flyvbjerg, Alexander Budzier and Daniel Lunn – analyzed all large dams which were built between 1934 and 2007 and for which reliable costs and schedule figures are available. Their database includes 245 projects in 65 countries with a total cost of $353 billion (in 2010 prices). The findings of their analysis, which were published today, are stunning:

Large dams suffered average cost overruns of 96%. The degree of cost overruns tended to increase with the size of projects. Even without considering social and environmental costs, large dams on average don’t make economic sense.

Project implementation suffered an average delay of 44%. The implementation schedule does not include the lengthy lead time required to prepare projects.

Dam builders and financiers frequently acknowledge the problems of the past, but claim that they have learned from their mistakes. The study by the Oxford research team shows that this is not the case. Neither cost nor schedule overruns have improved over time. “There is little learning from past mistakes”, the authors say. “By the same token, forecasts of costs of dams being made today are likely to be as wrong as they were between 1934 and 2007.”

The World Bank and other development banks often argue that their involvement improves the quality of risky projects. Again, the empirical evidence does not confirm this. Atif Ansar told me in a personal conversation that projects supported by multilateral development banks “do not perform better in terms of cost overruns”.

Both cost and schedule overruns affect projects in all world regions. Poor countries tend to have higher delays, possibly because weak government structures and economies don’t support the construction of complex large dams. Interestingly, projects in democratic countries also tend to experience longer delays, possibly because elected politicians use rosy forecasts to sell their projects.

The Oxford researchers conclude their evaluation with a series of recommendations. They suggest that energy planners need to forecast costs and schedules more realistically by integrating the empirical evidence for similar projects. Based on their database, they suggest that dam planners need to increase their cost estimates by 99% and their construction schedules by 66% if they want to achieve an 80% certainty that their projects are completed within budget and time.

The new paper illustrates what this means for the Diamer-Bhasha Dam in Pakistan. With 80% certainty, the giant project on the Indus River can be expected to cost $25.4 billion rather than $12.7 billion, and to be completed in 2027 rather than 2021. Under these circumstances, the project will not make economic sense. “Diamer-Bhasha Dam is a non-starter in Pakistan”, the authors comment. The same can be said for the Inga dams on the Congo, the Belo Monte Dam in the Amazon, the proposed dams on the Mekong mainstream and many other mega-projects.

The new research shows that energy projects that don’t depend on complex factors such as geology and streamflow and can be built quickly are preferable to complex large dams. “Many smaller, more flexible projects that can be built and go online quicker, and are more easily adapted to social and environmental concerns, are preferable to high-risk dinosaur projects like conventional mega-dams”, concluded Bent Flyvbjerg, the principal investigator, as the new paper was published. “If leaders of emerging economies are truly interested in the welfare of their citizens, they are better off laying grand visions of mega-dams aside”, his co-author Atif Ansar concurred.

Many actors have vested interests in building dams and may try to disregard the findings of the new study. Disinterested government officials and investors should take the facts and figures of the Oxford study seriously. The empirical evidence demonstrates that even on economic terms, large dams are usually not the best energy solution.

(Peter Bosshard is the Policy Director of International Rivers).

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2014/03/large-dams-are-uneconomic-scientific-study-finds/

By R. Rungsung

The word `Justice` is derived from the Latin word `JUS` which means anything that is proper and reasonable. The concept of justice is as old as philosophy itself. The theory of justice is used as both law and as social reality – i.e. legal and moral justice, law and morality. We are morally obliged to the state therefore the state is a means to the fulfillment of moral ends. Our obligation to obey the laws of the state depends on the fact that these laws are intended to secure justice or moral rights of the INDIVIDUALS. Justice may be also regarded as a concept concerned with the order of society as a whole and as an expression of the rights of an individual i.e. the natural rights of an individual which maintains that men have certain absolute moral right such as the right to life, to liberty and to pursue happiness. Human view maintained that the state is designed to guarantee and to protect the Natural rights. Justice is the foundation of social morality and without it the rest would collapse, (we all know, our land today, is ruled by corruptions without any moral compunction and undesirable incident are rampant these days).

In Plato`s Republic the work `Justice` means what is commanded by some governing `Power` – the power that be. What is just depends on the interest of the strong i.e. those who happen to posses power of government. But does the interest of the strong promote the good of the whole? The Governing Power should command with a view in their minds so as to realize the GOOD of the citizens over whom they exercise control. The good governance for the well-being of all citizens of the land/state is the ultimate goal for end of justice.

CORRECTIVE JUSTICE

Even if Justice in distribution has been tolerably secured within a particular community, various circumstances may arise to disturb it. The right way of meeting such disturbances was referred by Aristotle as Corrective Justice.

The disturbance may take place here and there by accident i.e. without the choice of any individual by agreement between individual or by the interference of one group with another group. Accidents can be, to some extent, compensated by insurance and provision is sometimes made by the state. On the other hand, justice may consist of breach of contract, robbery or personal violence, which may be verbal or physical. The principle of `eye for an eye` and `tooth for a tooth` is not one of compensation but of revenge and two wrongs do not make a right. All that the governing body (the state government) can do is to try to present such action by some sort of protecting agency – Police and Army personnel (here in Manipur, we found sometimes opposite).

Justice is truth in action. A long time of cases shows that it is merely of some importance, but is of fundamental importance that justice should not only be done, but should manifestly and undoubtedly be seen to be done. Martin Luther King said “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Ruling power using suppressive measures coupled with self-gains do not correspond to corrective justice.

We alt want to have a just social order where justice should be there in every department of life. In order to establish justice in the society, we have to fight Racialism, Communalism, Castism and other kinds of injustices, tyrannies and oppressions. Today we are in the channel of `the rich become richer and the poor become poorer` which the governance of the state turned blind eyes to `JUSTICE`. The call for justice has become the CRY in the desert. The cry in the valley is echoing in the hills. Will the Red accept the cry of Sana Leipak? Is there justice in the voice for equality? Any land and state must ensure to have good governance to enjoy justice.

JUSTICE RELATION WITH EQUALITY

The concept of Justice and equality are so closely related that one can`t be separated from the other. It can be said that one is incomplete without the other. Unless there is some sort of equality in social and economic matter (I repeat Social and Economic), it can`t be said that is a JUST society. To understand the concept of Justice we should understand the concept of equality.

The term Equality has several facts in democratic ways. Such as, (1) Social Equality, (2) Civil Equality, (3) Economic Equality and (4) Political Equality before the law of the Land/state under the general heading of EQUALITY. The idea equality is fundamentally a leveling process where people demand the same treatments from the state to all and resented and abhorred any distinction between one individual or between communities regarding rewards and punishments. No equality no liberty and thus troubles gained and added more and more upheaval in the state governance. Religiously hill people have big eyes looking longingly with earnest heart to live in peace with valley people, In order to ensure Justice, one must know the principle of `Dignity of Labour` and completely shun to become a parasite on others.

PEACE WITHOUT JUSTICE

Humanitarian aspect certainly demands justice that peace is the accepted end of all the nations. It requires a positive and constructive world order, where individual, groups and states eschew the desire to dominate and exploit each other, but live in co-operation and mutual give and take (aiding one another). This means – peace needs a new life-style based on justice. One can never say to an empty stomach person -“Go in … peace, have a good day”. The poor person has been sidelined, robbed, oppressed, discriminated and left empty handed and the robber is filled with stolen properties amassing wealth thinking high and telling within himself. “I don`t have to worry for tomorrow – eat, drink and satisfy yourselves”.

India today is in the channel of apathy, malfeasance and corruptions. Nothing is done without a bribe and the mouths of justice is stuffed with gold. The flood of money that gushed into politics today is a pollution of democracy. Without democracy, tolerance and human rights for all, no peace is truly safe, (to me and in my humble mind, I see many or more people go for heavy meals, shining clothes and luxurious travelling as the symbols of status discarding what justice demands).

PRESIDENT BECAME REFUGEE

What a beautiful house he lived in, what a glossy and shining clothes he wore. However, there were things he can`t discard and throw away which were haunting him day and night – sleepless nights, sudden awaking from deep sleep due to bad dreams, closed doors and windows and peeping through holes. Riding and travelling in luxurious cars (limousine) with throbbing heart beats and afraid to be seen where he/she is going or going to meet someone and somewhere. The powers he possessed blinded his minds and heart.

He was afraid to go alone without companions. Years ago, Idi Amin of Uganda travelled in five limousines fixing his EFFIGIES in other FOUR and he sat in other one to confuse who he really was, in order to evade attack. Strong and powerful, but fear ruled over him. Peace didn`t live in his heart. He fled his motherland and died as a refugee in other`s land.

Peace means without disturbance and a life of calm. Peace without justice is no peace. The peace of God, which passeth all understanding, shall keep your hearts and minds through Jesus Christ-(Philipines). Justice is truth in action. Today, Manipur is boiling on many fronts and looking at New Delhi only. Some are acting like SAINTS at Delhi and living like DEVILS at home.

He is unworthy of life that causes not life in others. As such, he is unworthy to live who lives only for himself. And that person is wading unsafe in unknown water. Let us use good means and God will give us the blessings we need.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2014/03/justice-is-the-root-of-peace/

By B.G. Verghese

The latest opinion polls following announcement of the general elections have forecast major gains by the BJP-NDA alliance at the cost of a floundering Congress-UPA. One need not question the integrity of the major polls though lesser known pollsters have been exposed through a sting operation as willing to trade margins for a consideration, an offshoot of the entirely unethical paid news phenomenon. The 11-Party post-election front remains wrapped in uncertainty while certain players like the AIDMK, Trinamool and even the BJD remain open to post-election alliances, with Jayalalithaa and MamataBannerjee making no secret of their prime ministerial ambitions.

Polls are prone to go awry. Even if the party numbers turn out to be broadly right, there could be upsets in the indicated preference or assumption of who will be prime minister. Modi currently leads the packbut it is not axiomatic that he will be the final choice. He remains controversial and even divisive to some, even within the BJP, witness the inner-party tussle over whether MurliManohar Joshi should give up his Varanasi seat to accommodate Modi.  

Elements within the BJP worry that once elevated, the man may remain entrenched for two or more terms thus putting paid to their ambitions. But the greater concern will be the views of the NDA partners unless the BJP on its own is in such a dominating position that it can dictate any terms. This seems unlikely. So even if Modi is the BJP’s choice (whatever the inner reservations), the NDA will have a casting vote on who is to be prime minister. The constituent parties may well prefer someone less right-wing, tainted and divisive and, more importantly, less influenced by the RSS- Hindutva lobby which has been given or certainly assumed a central role in the forthcoming elections as a matter of “Hindu survival”.

The RSS, a so-called “cultural body”, has been increasingly steering BJP policy of late, wary of losing its operational status as head of the Parivar and keeper of “cultural nationalism”. It will not allowa BJP government to cut loose. In his latest VijayaDashmi speech following its Amravati conclave last year, Mohan Bhagwat has called on RSS cadres to take the field and deliver “100 per cent Hindu voters” to the polling booths. Ashok Singhal, VHP is in fear of Hindus becoming a minority and has urged Hindu mothers to bear five children! NarendraModi has told Northeasterners to welcome Hindu migrants from Bangladesh, Fiji, Mauritius and the US, where they face persecution, but throw out Muslim and Christian infiltrators. In Ayodhya, the repair and construction of mosques within a sacred radius has virtually been prohibited under VHP pressure. Numbers of ex-servicemen are meanwhile joining the BJP on account of its sturdy “nationalism”.

At its latest annual conclave in Bangalore the RSS determined not to compromise on “moral values, social systems and traditions in the name of individual freedom” on such issues as live-in relationships and homosexuality.  Wendy Donniger’s book “On Hinduism” has been pulped under pressure.Elsewhere moral policing continues. The BJP continues to demand passage of a uniform civil code; but what is utterly surprising that the Party does not legislate this in any of the States it rules as is constitutionally permissible and does no injury to personal law. A UCC, already partly extant in the form of the Special Marriage Act, would liberate women from male bondage, make for equal opportunity and cut at the root of the power of fundamentalist clerics of all faiths who now rule the roost. The indifference to such a basic reform across the board, largely born of legal illiteracy reinforced by gender insensitivity, is truly astonishing. The Supreme Court has however just moved to legalise Muslim adoption under civil law, a step towards the making of a uniform code.  

To get back to the polls, aware of the negative vibes caused by Modi’s record in 2002.Rajnath Singh, the BJP president, has said that the party is prepared to apologise to the Muslims in case any injusticewas done to them. Only a sense of inner guilt can explain this dubious apology. A more curious reference to 2002 came thereafter from Venkiah Naidu who sought to prove that the party is stronger than any individual (such as Modi).He argued that when Vajpayee  chastisedModi and called on him to resign, reminding him of his raj dharma as Gujarat’s chief minister, the party collectively vetoed the prime minister. Was Vajpayee then an ill-informed maverick talking out of turn or a liberal statesman deeply anguished by the holocaust?

So the jury is still out on who may be prime minister even if the 2014 electoral outcome indicates a BJPsurge under Modi’s leadership.One must wait to see how the chips fall. However, one does not see the Congress under Rahul Gandhi going anywhere. The Government was busy frantically handing out lollipops hours before the election code came into force. Governors were appointed at 3.20 a.m, the Defence Minister’s achievements were eulogised at 7.30 a.m and the Home Ministry announced that certain Wakf properties would not be acquired just 10 minutes before the election code deadline. Reservations for Jats from the OBC quota were also announced.

In another display of illiberalism, a group of women academics at Aligarh Muslim University celebrated International Women’s Day by extolling purdah. At a private Meerut college, a group of Kashmiri students that cheered Pakistan’s cricket victory over India caused some understandable annoyance.That was then followed by an over-the-top sedition charge against them by the UP police which was fortunately rescinded a day later after Omar Abdullah spoke to AkhileshYadav. We have to become more mature and avoid knee-jerk reactions.

The poll campaign is warming up but the AAP-BJP brawls in Delhi, Lucknow, and in Gujarat are a warning signal. The AAP was wrong to see the Gandhinagar police’s temporary detention of Kejriwal’s motorcade for moving without sanction after the coming into force of the election code, as an “arrest”. This sparked off a fractious Delhi rally by AAP supporters before the BJP office and a retaliatory strike by the BJP in Lucknow. This kind of rowdyism must be put down with a firm hand. Nor should the man who blackened YogendraYadav’s face with ink at Delhi’s JantarMatar be let off on Yadav’s say so. Unless such conduct is dealt with sternly, others will be encouraged to misbehave and plead immunity.

www.bgverghese.com

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2014/03/poll-surge-vs-pm-stakes/

By Amar Yumnam

Manipur is lovely, lovable and exciting. This is for various reasons. First, we love her for we were born and brought up here. Second, with such a romantic past in every phase of her history, she is lovable to the core. Personally too, this place has made me meet the person I love most and realise why I do so. Third, it is an exciting place for anyone interested in socio-economic issues because of the unique socio-economic lessons to be learnt from the dynamics of the evolving grammar of society in this place.

The global experience has been that the generalisation of trust is an important ingredient for development, or, to put it more emphatically, widespread trust has a causal positive impact on growth of a region. The failure to generalise trust has been a most significant undoing in the Islamic world in recent decades. This generalisation of trust requires an atmosphere and a means for heightened exchange and interaction among the population. This is more so in an ethnically heterogeneous society like Manipur’s because exchange and interaction facilitate the generalisation of trust. But heightened exchange and interaction do not happen in a vacuum; these happen when the development interventions, like roads, are put in place for these to happen.

This is where the emerging grammar of society and evolving picture of Manipur turn out to be very exciting, not from the angle of development of the region but from the perspective of a physician who speaks of a patient with rare ailment as interesting case. The emergence of highway blockades, general strikes and the like as generalised tools of presumably social responses to issues and media for pressuring the authorities for action in a particular way is something to be seriously thought of in contemporary Manipur. In the old days when the infrastructure was as undeveloped as it could be, and exchange and interactions were periodic, there was a kind of generalised trust in Manipur as oral history tells us. But the directions in which the changes have taken place in recent decades are such that the traditional generalised trust has been brutally replaced by individualised trust. In an atmosphere of generalised trust, the social advancement facilitated by it benefits the whole society without discrimination.
But this definitely has not been the case in Manipur.

The deterioration in the nature and strength of generalised trust is to be treated as the cost of the conflicts that has been affecting the region for the last quite a few decades. The governance response to addressing the problems associated with these conflicts has been rather one of satisficing a few individuals instead of addressing the underlying causes of the conflicts. This had the impact of enticing a few protagonists and their followers towards a satisficing approach to life and livelihood with the unfortunate outcome of compromising the generalised trust. This definitely eroded the historical roots of development. More unfortunately, the governance too had satisfied itself with the concentrated approach of satisficing a few individuals instead of addressing the generalised issues of development for the larger population.

Now what happens is that human beings behave in a path dependent way in the sense that they also follow the means which had paid off. In an otherwise negative case, there could be an atmosphere wherein the few individuals who had monopolised the satisfaction become the powerful and articulate groups in such a way that the general population become irrelevant in every socially meaningful arena of action. Something like this has happened in the case of Manipur. The model of the social grammar currently being practised in Manipur is such that one has to be a significant player of protagonists of conflict. Since all the population do not have the inclination for this, only a few specialise in this. The governance also has been following the practice of attending to the satisficing needs of these few individuals rather than adopting a society-wide development agenda. Now the relationship between this approach of the governance and the satisficing few individuals has reached such a level of social strength that the benefits of development interventions are monopolised by these few individuals. The worst part is that the convergence of interests between the individuals and the governance has been such that the general population do not have the courage to complain in the open even if their own privileges have been usurped by the connivance of the few and the persons in governance. Though it is supposedly a democracy in name, the actual practice has been one of exploitative autocracy with the voice of the larger majority finding no place in the grammar of functioning of the polity.

This is the reason why poverty removal schemes have not delivered at all, and these caused the opposite of concentration of benefits in a few hands. Now this requires certain things in place in Manipur sooner than later so that the desired generalised social outcomes are generated. First, we need a definitive governance with social-wide presence in Manipur. The absence of the reach of governance has only provided an opportunity to a select few with pseudo-reform articulations for extracting the maximum from the governance and without in any case allowing the common population to share the outcome of governance interventions. The generalised reach of governance should orient itself to addressing the development needs which could be shared by all without any hindrance. Secondly, it continually serves the interest of these people that governance remains as poor as ever for this sustains their individualised prosperity and limited social relevance. The time has come for the larger population to raise their shared voices instead of succumbing to the periodic noises of the few specialists in pseudo-conflicts. Third, the delivery mechanism of governance for any development intervention should be the primary plank of action.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2014/03/individualised-benefits-of-conflict-generalised-cost-of-conflict-and-governance-failure-the-long-term-dynamics-of-manipur-polity/