Tag: Editorial

An official report from New Delhi, announced on the national TV channels as well as on the Press Information Bureau website, the Government of India`™s official information outlet, said a historic peace accord has been concluded between the NSCN(IM) and the Government this afternoon, bringing to a happy conclusion 18 years of negotiations and more than 60 years of violent insurrection by the Nagas against the Indian state. In all fairness, it must be said it is too early to comment or presume foreknowledge just as yet. By the same virtue, it would be preposterous to either celebrate or condemn the agreement. No details of the agreement have been revealed, and the PIB website simply says this will be made known in a few days. Until then, everything will be just speculations, and there will be plenty, some informed ones as well as some wild ones. The IFP must however pat itself for its editorial today (August 3, 2015) was bang on target in anticipating something of the nature soon on the consideration that the current generation of the NSCN(IM)`™s top leadership were getting far too old and this would have brought in some sense of urgency on either side of the negotiating table to bring the contentious issue to a closure as quickly as possible. In fact, the fact that one of the two top leaders of the organisation, Chairman Isak Chishi Swu has become critically ill, would have driven this urgency to a point of desperation.

While we await the details of the accord, let us try and assess what the contents of the agreement might have been by piecing together information that are available and from hindsight knowledge of some of the relevant chapters of the Naga struggle. From the indication given in today`™s function at the Prime Minister`™s residence at 7 Race Course Road, it does appear that the two main planks of the Naga struggle, that of sovereignty and integration of what are claimed to be Naga areas in Manipur, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Myanmar with Nagaland, have been abandoned. It also appears that the major concessions the Naga negotiators managed were in having the Government of India agree to acknowledge Naga history as unique, and concede to some more administrative autonomy for the Nagas in determining their future within the broad confines of the Indian Constitution. If this picture is true, what then would be the likely problem ahead for those who fashioned the accord, and those who would be covered by the purview of the accord?

What is most likely to have been agreed upon then is a watered down versions of Naga sovereignty and Naga integration. It remains to be seen if these will be acceptable to the neighbouring states, on the one hand, and more importantly to the larger Naga public. Indeed, it must have been a very fine balancing act that the negotiators must have had to go through. For they must have been all along aware that they can end up damned from either sides of the divide for diluting the two questions of Naga sovereignty and Naga integration too much or too little. The sovereignty could have for instance been interpreted as Nagaland government and/or Naga companies being made stakeholders in mineral resources extraction undertakings in Naga territories, which would include oil, of which Nagaland`™s Wokha district is now known to have a major deposit. Sovereignty could also have been watered down to mean more autonomy under the Indian Constitution, as for instance 6th Schedule type grassroots governance models, especially for Nagas in Manipur, for Nagaland as a separate state, already has considerable autonomy in self-governance.

Considering these speculations have a fair measure of accuracy, what would be the problems ahead? Probably the dissenting voices from neighouring states of Nagaland would be manageable if not negligent, for their territories would be untouched. In Manipur the autonomy model can come up for some serious censures, but this should not be beyond negotiation if autonomy concessions, including on the ILP question, are made for the non-reserved, non-tribal districts as well. The bigger problem in such a scenario as we can foresee it would be from Nagaland, particularly if today`™s accord offered to the Nagas nothing substantially more than what the Shillong Accord of 1975 promised. It may be recalled the NSCN had rejected the Shillong Accord calling it a betrayal and opted to continue the Naga struggle for sovereignty. Under the circumstance, the obvious difficult question NSCN would be left to answer is, what was the need for the 40 more years of suffering for the Nagas if all that are now presented as achievements have not much more than in the accord of 1975. The other likely problem is, if the present accord is about concessions for the Nagas in Manipur mostly in terms of autonomous administrative models, Nagas of Nagaland many resent that they were dragged into 40 more years of turmoil for what in the end has turned out to be for the benefit of Nagas in Manipur. But, these are only speculations and things could be very different from the picture imagined aloud here. All therefore can only watch and wait what the exact contents of the agreement turn out to be, for only then can any rational decision be made on what response is appropriate and fit to purpose.

Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/08/speculating-naga-accord/

Manipur has never been in bigger trouble. Even the weather gods seem not at all eager to be kind to it this time. Incessant rains for a few days and the state ended up devastated by floods in the valley and landslides in the hills. The extent of damage caused has not been, and could not have been, ascertained just as yet, but from the look of the devastation, it will not be anything to trifle. At least 20 lives have been reported lost in a landslide which buried an entire hamlet, Joumol under Khengjoi Sub-Division in Chandel District near the Myanmar border. Some reports put the figure higher by a few, but whatever the exact number of casualties was, it will not change the magnitude of the tragedy. The site of the landslide is remote and not easy to reach even in normal times, but during the monsoons when all approach roads become a slush of mud, the area has always remained virtually cut off. Now, after these cloudbursts in the last few days and the disasters of landslides, it would be impossible to reach the site and return without sparing a few days. No wonder then there are still no accurate reports of the disaster as yet. This does not however mean the government must wait for the situation to improve. It must urgently send rescue teams there. If necessary, it must press helicopter service to do so.

Joumol suffered the worst in terms of human casualties, but the extent of the damage is far wider. Almost all the valley districts and the flatter reaches of Chandel district towards Chakpikarong have suffered flooding. It is however Thoubal and foothills of Chandel districts which have suffered the worst. Although except for a case of one person drowning there have been no other human casualties reported, it is imaginable what the losses would be in terms of homesteads and properties destroyed, crops and livestock lost. As the picture become clearer, it is quite likely to reveal an unprecedented tragedy. Apart from the profound individual tragedies, it would probably also spell big trouble for the state for the coming year or even years. The inundated areas constitute a major portion of the rice bowl of the state, and if the crops have been destroyed beyond redemption, food shortage in the year ahead is predictable, even with the assistance which would come as disaster relief from the Centre. What is essential now is for the state government to get into the act. It must first begin the rescue operations in earnest, and then take stock of the depth and spread of the damage so that it can start formulating ways to contain the miseries ahead.

The trouble is, this natural disaster is not the only problem there is for the government to tackle. At this moment the state has so many unfinished agendas for the government to resolve. The Inner Line Permit System agitation which had set the state on fire for almost the past one month is the most immediate of these. Even as the weather improved, there were already protest rallies in some areas of Imphal. Since the two districts of Imphal were the least affected by the floods, at least for a week, till the flood waters completely recede, these two districts should keep the agitations low key as a show of solidarity to those who faced the flood devastation. There are more problems at hand. There were some reports in sections of the media today that the Nagaland government is preparing to push the question of Greater Nagaland probably in a bid to facilitate a conclusive treaty between the Government of India and the NSCN(IM) who have been in an inconclusive peace negotiation for the last 18 years. The urgency is clear. The NSCN(IM) leadership are getting old, and indeed the organisation`™s Chairman Isak Chishi Swu is already on his last leg, and General Secretary Th. Muivah too has entered the octogenarian decade, therefore the need to enter into an acceptable settlement would have to be felt desperately on both sides of the negotiating table. As to what kind of bearings this can have on Manipur is nothing ambiguous.

In the meantime, something would have to be done about those power brokers who build their private residences as sturdy and steel reinforced as bridges should be built, precisely by building bridges of straw and pocketing the money. The number of dams and bridges which were washed away even at the hint that the rivers were swelling is not a matter of joke. It is reported that flimsy 6mm steel rods were used to build the fallen brand new Sekmai minor irrigation dam for which Rs. 4.11 crore was sanctioned by the NEC. Petty bicycle thieves in the bazar are often caught and locked up in custody, so why shouldn`™t those who steal big money from public funds also not be hauled up and treated as all thieves should be? The trouble is, if this were to be done, even top functionaries of the government would have to spend time behind bars.

Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/08/disaster-upon-disaster/

It is no longer just the roads that get washed away every monsoon. Now bridges too are unable to withstand the torrents. From what we are witnessing, it is unimaginable that this is an age of unthinkable technological revolution elsewhere in the world and people are building highways under the sea and through mountains. These are times when in certain advanced countries, there are plans to convert highways into clean energy generating solar panels, or to recycle waste plastic to build roads, somewhat promising to put a modern day scourge to good use. The good news is, in this era of globalisation, like all else, technologies too spread and become available to almost all corners of the world in no time. There is little to doubt that these latest technological advances, or their products, too would become available everywhere soon, either through channels of dissemination the legal market or else through grey underworld of cloning and piracy, a phenomenon yet uncontrolled, but in many ways a boon to the extent that it has checked total monopoly of technology by the rich countries. If not for the cloners in countries like China and India, who knows so many of the wonders of modern times, including cell phones, would have still remained out of reach of a bulk of humanity living outside the affluent bracket.

If it can be argued the current cutting edge generation of technology are too distant and expensive for places like Manipur to acquire, surely earlier generations, perhaps even three or four generations down the line, would probably still be enough do wonders to Manipur`™s physical infrastructure. If ageing infrastructures built during the colonial times, such as the ancient Maharani Thong on Nambul River have withstood the monsoon torrents for more than a century and half, how are dams and bridges built within the last one decade (some of them like the Sekmai dam still brand new), tumbling like nine pins at the first monsoon they encounter. Something seriously is rotten in the state of Manipur and this fact has been known for at least the last couple of decades, yet nothing has changed. In all likelihood, though this rot is exposed unlike ever before this time in the serial collapses of bridges this monsoon, nothing will probably change and things will be where they always were. Official corruption which is the major cause of all that we are witnessing now, will also predictably continue to roll on as ever before, as if nothing has happened.

Why is this state of decay so persistently refusing remedies? Why has it become so predictable that even the biggest shame that visits the place eroding the very being of the society would not ensure a check on corruption? The answer is simple. Corruption today has become such a monolithic structure in which everybody and anybody who is someone in the society has come to have a stake in the booties it offers. All through the government hierarchies, corruption abounds. Practically in every hierarchy there are middlemen and women, doing the haggling for bribe amounts for everyday government favours that should have come for no cost at all under normal circumstances, to be handed over to their bosses higher up for a percentage cut for the safe buffer against ignominy they provide these bosses. The bosses do not take the bribes directly, but the bribes chain stretches to them from the bottom. This being the case, each link in the chain protects the back of the next link to ensure the chain remains, and thus corruption remains institutionalised. While bridges and roads get washed away by the monsoon each year, the number of imported sports utility vehicles, SUVs, reciprocally rise on these same dilapidated roads. The number of expensive apartments owned by government employees in the metropolises of the country too has been growing by leaps and bounds. Can things get any worse?

This year has seen the worst monsoon from this vantage. The obvious inference is, the past decade has been the most corrupt. The percentage of public money meant for building these infrastructures that turned into SUVs and marble palaces also probably has been the highest. In a stagnant economy like Manipur, where government jobs are virtually its only source of liquidity, there is something disturbing in the wealth that has come to accumulate in the hands of few, even as the larger masses are driven increasingly to desperate poverty. The contractor-bureaucrat-technocrat-politician nexus siphoning off Manipur`™s resources is coming to strangulate the state. What is even more disturbing is, in the contractor category of this nexus are also gun totting self-professed saviours of the land. It is also bitterly ironic that in this unholy partnership, sworn enemies who kill each other on the battlefields, happily feast together from the cauldron of corruption.

Leader Writer: Pradip phanjoubam

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/07/unholy-corruption-feast/

Yakub Abdul Memon, one of the accused in the Bombay serial blasts of 1993, was hanged to death early this morning inside the Nagpur jail where he was interned. Memon was convicted of the charge of financing the bomb blasts which killed 257 people and injured another 713. His brother `Tiger` Memon and notorious Mumbai gangster Dawood Ibrahim, were believed to be the masterminds of the mayhem, but both are in hiding out of the country. It is now known that Yakub Memon was formally arrested in 1994 from the New Delhi railway station, though he had earlier been whisked away by Indian sleuths from Kathmandu where he had allegedly come to consult his lawyers for possible routes for his acquittal in the case. He was sentenced to death in July 2007 along with 11 others. Twenty others were also sentenced to life imprisonment for involvement in the same crime. In 2013, the Supreme Court commuted the death sentences of all except Memon to life imprisonment. The court upheld Memon`™s sentence citing `his commanding position in the crime of utmost gravity` warranted no less.
We are no authority to comment on the guilt or otherwise of Memon in the dastardly Bombay serial blasts. It was however distressing to see such a sharp and irreconcilably polarised divide in the opinions of the country on the matter of his execution. One camp was rejoicing, describing this as justice done to what they called the `collective conscience` of the country. The same misplaced overflow of triumphal nationalism that we all witnessed during the June 8 cross border military strike into Myanmar, which later proved to be a damp squib, was seen repeated all over again. Memon probably was not innocent of the crime, but all the same this kind of reaction, we must say, was distasteful, and we say this in the belief death is nothing to be celebrated. The other camp is not a monolithic block. Some agree Memon would have had a part in the crime but were opposed to the death penalty on ethical grounds. Others who also do not dispute Memon would have been guilty, still wanted him spared on the `quality of mercy` plea that Shakespearean heroin Portia in `The Merchant of Venice` made immortal: `The quality of mercy is not strain`d,/ It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven/ Upon the place beneath:/ it is twice blest;/ It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.` Alas, the nation it seems does not have the patience for the poetry. Yet others take the extreme stand that Memon was not guilty and was framed to pacify what was vaunted by those seeking his death as the `collective conscience` of the nation.

We would probably stand with those who think Capital punishment is too vengeful and cruel. It also serves no purpose in terms of fighting crime than to satisfy the atavistic bloodlust defined by the principle of `an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth`. Death penalty has never been an adequate deterrent against crime either, and no country which has it, including the United States, has seen a decline in crimes punishable by death. We would also go for the `quality of mercy` plea, in the faith that mercy does bless the receiver as well as the giver, and equally that refusing it harms both spiritually. In this sense, commuting Memon`™s death sentence to one of life imprisonment would not have been about saving a life only, but about India giving itself grace. This alas was also not to be.
On the cruelty of the death sentence, no other has argued it more powerfully and convincingly than by another character in a work of art `“ Prince Muishkin in Dostoyevsky`™s `The Idiot`. The horror, he says, is not so much in the pain of the execution, but the murder of hope for life. He argues that the most dreadful experience the convict is made to face is not the execution itself, but the time between the execution and the pronouncement of his death sentence. For this reason, the crime of murder is less cruel than the death sentence, for in a murder, the victim even when his throat is cut, still clings on to hope that he/she will survive, and that is his salvation to the last. This salvation is not there for the man on death row. A soldier who can defy death in battlefield will breakdown and resign if his death sentence were to be read out to him, he says further. Imagine what must have gone through the mind of Memon yesterday night, knowing he would be hanged by morning. Capital punishment is too inhuman, and we would agree with the prince that no humane society must endorse it.

Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/07/inhuman-punishment/

There is undoubtedly beauty in the spontaneous energy of the masses that Manipur is so richly endowed with. Time and again, throughout history, this rich fund of energy inherent in the society had come to the place`™s rescue whenever it was in dire need. In historical times, this is evident among others from the mid-18th Century onwards, ever since the ascendance of the Konbaung Dynasty in Ava, and the death of King Pamheiba in Manipur. Authoritative historians of SE Asia, (including D.G.E. Hall, G.E. Harvey, Victor Lieberman, and we cite these Western scholars here for the sake of the dispassionate distance necessary) generally agree marauding horsemen of King Pamheiba contributed heftily to the fall of the Tongoo Dynasty, paving the way for the Konbaung Dynasty to assume power in Ava. The first mission of the founder of the Konbaung Dynasty, King Alaungpaya was to raid and subdue Manipur, and in this raid the King himself took part though he did not stay in Manipur for more than a few days as news of another uprising by the Mons reached him while he was still on the Manipur mission. This was the decade after Pamheiba had died, and there was a succession tussle between his sons. This would be undoubtedly one of those pivotal periods of Manipur history, and we have many terrifying as well as enchanting stories from the time. As for instance, during King Alaungpaya`™s raid, the ruler in Manipur was King Chingthungkhomba, or Bheigyachandra, King Pamheiba`™s grandson, whose father was an unworldly ascetic who did not remain on the throne for long as he one day simply walked away into the forest never to return, leaving his brother ascend the throne. Bheigyachandra ousts his uncle but in time had to flee to the Ahom Kingdom during King Alaungpaya`™s raid, but the resilience of the people was such that under his leadership, they returned to recapture their kingdom. The myth is, during exile, in what must have been one of his most traumatic and trying times after the Ahom King began to suspect he was an imposter and was asked to tame a wild elephant singlehandedly to prove he was indeed the king of Manipur, he had a vision of the Ras Lila. He choreographed this dream after regaining his kingdom, and this dance went on to be considered a Classical Indian Dance two centuries later. Bheigyachandra inherited one more crisis. His grandfather Pamheiba (said to be a Naga) had not only converted to Hinduism but also made it the state religion. Understandably, after Pamheiba`™s death a bitter friction between the followers of the original faith and those of Hinduism resurfaced. Bheigyachandra`™s challenge was also to stem this. In a play on the life of the king, M.C. Arun of the Manipur University, interestingly interpreted that Bheigyachandra`™s Ras Lila is not only the king`™s masterpiece in terms of art, but also a masterstroke of politics and diplomacy to bring together and marry the two faiths so peace may return to his kingdom.

To return to the original contention, Manipur`™s energy within is admirable, but if left unharnessed, it can also lead to chaos and mayhem. The current agitation for the implementation of the Inner Line Permit System or an equivalent Act too is beginning to show signs of this danger. For one thing, it does seem there is no longer any central command directing and regulating the tempo of the street protests. Reports of ambulances being attacked, doctors, pressmen and other essential services not being spared even when they have proofs they are out on duty, and most disturbingly, the tendency of some sections of the protestors resorting to communal sloganeering etc., are indeed disturbing. Let the leadership of the movement be wary that if left unchecked, this can overturn the applecart, delaying the fruits and in the worst case scenario, even nullifying all efforts so far. The spontaneous surge of energy on the streets is amazing, and indeed grand, but what is now called for is for this energy to be sublimated and channelized into productive directions by the movement`™s leadership, and even more importantly, by the Government of Manipur. In a not so dissimilar way, the challenge today is somewhat akin to what was before King Bheigyachandra. Whatever the faults and sins of the king, among which is allegedly the crime of incest, it must be said he was a statesman and visionary. He fashioned a sublime order out of destructive and chaotic energy which was also prevalent in his time. Let those at the helm have the statesmanship and vision to also bring justiciable order back to this beleaguered state, ensuring this new social harmony sought is in keeping with the universal understanding justice. Genuine grievances (of which ensuring survival of small indigenous populations is definitely one), must be addressed and remedied, but care must be taken that nobody is unjustly victimised. This new order must not be allowed to be defined by a zero sum game equation, and instead be one in which all can be in a gainful partnership.

Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/07/sublimating-the-spontaneous/

This must be one of those relapses into complete chaos Manipur periodically goes through. The Inner Line Permit System, ILPS, issue which had been simmering all along, suddenly came to a boil with the unfortunate death of a school boy Sapam Robinhood, 16, and by all accounts has reached a point of no return. The government will have to do something to assuage the fears of the larger public that a demographic overturn because of incessant influx of settlers would see the indigenous populations end up marginalised in their own land. Failing this it is unlikely the present crippling agitation will fade out and the state may end up injuring itself materially and economically beyond easy repairs. The government will have to exercise its imagination to come up with a remedial law which brings justice without unduly hurting or victimising anybody in particular. But even while this onerous issue remains unresolved, other demons are raising their heads. Needless to add these demons are the creations of the culture of corruption rampant in the state today. The collapse of the brand new Sekmai dam is the most recent. What explanations do the government and its engineering wing handling the construction work have for this? The government owes an answer to the public with whose money this dam was built in the first place.

This is not all. Although the government in the last Assembly session, explained to some extent its position the Mapithel Dam which is now submerging Chadong village in the Ukhrul district, it would still be fit to the purpose to come out with a comprehensive white paper on the matter? It definitely would benefit the people to be told what was the nature and size of the rehabilitation package given to the affected villagers; When was the idea of the dam conceived?; When was its construction commissioned?; Who was the contractor?; What was the total cost of the construction and equally importantly how much money was earmarked for rehabilitation?; Were there free, prior and informed consent taken from those who would be displaced?; Were social and environmental impact assessments made, and if yes, who made these assessments and what was their final report like?; Who sanctioned the construction of the new school building at Chadong which is now more or less underwater, and which contractor was given the task? Obviously the school was built even as the dam was being constructed so how did the government not know the ground on which the school stood was below the dam height therefore would come underwater once the dam floodgates were shut?; It would be ridiculous for the government to think making these information public would compromise the state`™s or the nation`™s security. On the other hand, withholding them would arouse suspicion, especially in these troubled times that the government has something to hide. Let the government be reminded, policy transparency, except when it involves sensitive classified information, can solve many problems automatically.

But the Mapithel Dam uncertainty goes deeper. Newspaper reports in the past few weeks now have brought to the fore the insecurity of the population downstream. If Chadong and other villages in the dam area are having to shift villages, downstream villagers now fear their lives are in danger as the dam seems to be leaking and if this weakens the structural integrity of the dam, it could ultimately result in the disaster of a dam burst, wiping off everything in the path of the water released suddenly from the dam reservoir. Engineers handling the construction of the dam have since clarified there is no danger at all, and such leakages are absolutely normal. They better be very sure about this for on their words rests the lives of several thousand men, women and children. Or better still, to give confidence to those who think their lives are in danger from a possible disaster, these engineers should be made to camp at the vulnerable villages for a few months until the situation stabilises. To think this is just the beginning of the life of the dam is scary. If there have been structural flaws in the construction of the dam, it would mean threat to the lives and properties of many downstream villages until the dam`™s life come to an end and it is de-commissioned. Let a serious, expert assessment be made now, and if the dam is flawed, let it be decommissioned now before disaster strikes. Conceded the government would be under tremendous pressure at this moment, but let it also be known that its troubles are the fruits of its unmitigated vice of corruption through the decades.

Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/07/crime-and-punishment/

If the governments in the decades that have gone by, had ensured that at least the education sector in Manipur was untouched by corruption, the state today would have been shining much brighter. In all probability, there would have been no need for a section of the Meiteis to want to be included in the Schedule Tribes list either, for the competition readiness of young job seekers overall would have been raised much higher than they are today, ensuring the community is able to garner a good share of the general seats in all-India competitions for the top jobs on offer by the Union government. Those already in the Schedule Tribes list, probably would also be ready by now to confidently and voluntarily enter the general category. Ultimately the playing fields would have to be levelled out, but it is better for this levelling to be at higher plateaus so that skills and awareness remain competitive even at the national level, than to seek the bars of competitions to be lowered and competitors from the state be patronisingly treated as handicapped by the rest of the country. This will ultimately tell on the psychology of the place, and the worst damage will not be so much when others begin to condescendingly doubt the worth of their achievements, but when they begin to doubt the worths of their own achievements.

The presumption we are making here is that those among the Meiteis who want to be listed as Schedule Tribes, want it so as to avail the benefits of being in this category in the Indian dispensation and not because they actually think they are sociologically worthy of the tribal status. We are also making a distinction between a `Schedule Tribe` and a `tribe`. Take the case of Nepal where there are as many different ethnic communities as in the Northeast, as an illustration. None of the ethnic communities, big or small, in the country call themselves `tribes`, because there is absolutely no benefit to be had in the country by being called thus. They all however call themselves `indigenous peoples`, among others complicating the definition of `indigenous` as in most other Asian regions, as a respected scholar in the field, Christian Erni also notes. As to who is a Schedule Tribe there can be no dispute. These are the communities listed in the 5th Schedule of Indian Constitution, but as to who is actually a `tribe`, if strict sociological and anthropological definitions were adhered to, will be as contentious as deciding who exactly is `indigenous`. Can someone who shops on the internet, is used to internet banking, for whom credit cards and cell phones are indispensable everyday accessories as vital as oxygen, travels by air, lives in cities, holds a modern job, rather than live off a hunting-gathering economy, subsists on primitive agriculture, believes in animistic religions, goes on clan wars etc, be sociologically or anthropologically a `tribe`?

Nobody can dispute the fact that most of the problems Manipur faces today are because of official corruption which has hastened a corroding of public faith in the government. The one institution which catalysed this corrosion the most would have to be education. It is true as government schools and colleges began to rot sometime in the 1970s, there was a revolution initiated by a few missionary schools which in the decades that followed resulted in the birth of many sterling private schools, offering quality school education to students. It is not a co-incidence that the best of these later private schools were founded by the first, second and third generation students educated in the early missionary schools. However, private schools run on the money they earn so have to have a cost, and this cost is not affordable to all. Therefore, only a parallel improvement in the standard of education in government schools could have been able to reach this revolution in school education to all sections of the population. This was never allowed to happen because of corruption and nepotism which ensured government schools are filled to the brim with unqualified teachers. The resultant deficit in the competitive levels of most of our students is loudly visible today. It must be however said in all fairness that things are improving now, and hopefully by the next generation, this vital sector would be on track again setting off a chain reaction for the better.
If in the school sector, the private schools have been the saving grace to some extent, of the college sector where there have been no such revolutions, the less said the better so far. If an inquiry were to be done today, it will not be a surprise at all if a good number of teachers are found to hold fake Ph.D certificates. We are not saying this out of the familiar intuitive judgment based on the small trickle of quality papers coming out of the faculties of these institutions of higher education, or the flight of students to colleges in other states, but from a knowledge that fake certificates from fake universities, including one in Meghalaya which had been only a few years ago shut down after its fraudulence was discovered, have made their way into our colleges.

Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/07/corrosive-corruption/

The collapse on July 23, of the Sekmai River Lift Irrigation (RLI) Scheme dam built on the Imphal River under the sponsorship of NEC at the cost of Rs. 4.22 crores, should simply be the limit of public tolerance of corruption. That this disaster should have come when the state is literally in an inferno over an issue that many see as an existential crisis Manipur is faced with, has brought out the nature of rot in the system and the shameless unconcern of the power elite like nothing else could have. There had been complaints from people in the Sekmai area about the atrocious and dangerous compromises in the built quality of the dam but no serious heed was paid until cracks began to be noticed around June and the matter came up for discussions in the Assembly during the tumultuous monsoon session where the chief minister Okram Ibobi had clarified that the completed project had still not been totally handed over to the government, so it was the concerned contractor who should be made answerable. He did say that the matter was being inquired into by the state`™s vigilance department.

This is a very lame excuse at best. By Manipur standards, this is not a small project, therefore it is unlikely the entire project money was released immediately after the project was awarded to the contractor. Instead funds would have been released in steps, after crosschecking the quality as well as progress of the construction work. The fault therefore, cannot under any circumstance be of the contractor or contractors alone. Those who awarded the work; those who were supposed to monitor and clear the project at every stage; as well as the contractors who actually executed the work would all have been party to this organised robbery. This obviously is also not an isolated incident, but part of the state`™s modern culture of corruption whereby an elaborate nexus of contractor-technocrat-bureaucrat-politician siphons off public money into their individual pockets in standardised percentages. The rising number of government employees with accumulated wealth far beyond their known sources of incomes, is evidence of this rot within the system. People only laugh at petty VDF personnel on the streets extorting petty changes from auto rickshaws, but generally are unconcerned about the bigger, more brazen and more organised thefts happening at practically every level of the government. The higher the hierarchy of these nexuses, the bigger also would be the booties at stake. Since the Sekmai dam could not even withstand the onslaught of a single monsoon torrent of a river that can hardly be said to be mighty, it is anybody guess what percentage of the Rs. 4.22 crore would have been spent in the actual construction of the dam.

The question of the threat of demographic marginalisation of the original population of the state is nothing to trifle, but the bigger threat to the survival of any people is a corrupt leadership who place their personal benefits and welfares ahead of public good. Plenty of scholarships available today on histories of societies which survived the worst odds and those which perished when faced with adversities that could have been survived, all point to this. Anthropologist Jared Diamond`™s celebrated 2005 book: `Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed` is just one of these. Manipur at this moment seems to resemble some of the worst case scenarios Diamond sketches. The alarming thing is, nobody reprimands corruption today. Anybody who is rich, even when there is a big question mark on his or her known legitimate sources of income, is envied and respected. The new culture is such that given the opportunity, even those outside the corruption nexus, would willingly be partners in the same crimes that they pretend to revile while not belonging to the nexus. Money, even if it is corruption money, enjoys a social sanctity today. This is the tragedy.

It is rather late in the day, but the government must at least make the effort to absolve itself of the crime of corruption. So far it could at least hide its head in the sand, claiming these are mere allegation from its opponents, but not anymore. The Sekmai dam collapse, and yes the submergence of a newly built school building at Chadong, have made this sordid affair openly visible to anyone. Let there be impartial inquiries into these atrocious affairs and all found guilty awarded exemplary punishments as per law. But the matter must not be allowed to end here. A civil society initiated social reformation movement against corruption is also called for. A general censure, rather than respect, of people who get wealthy by dubious means, can be a good start.

Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/07/damned-by-sekmai-dam/

It is a scathing commentary on the quality of political leadership in Manipur that governance in the state, especially on important and sensitive matters, has been all along a knee-jerk reaction affair. The familiar pattern has been and still is, for the government to recede into activity for long periods, either caught in politicking marked by activities such as demands for reshuffles in the ministry by legislators wishing for their shares of the spoils of power, or else simply surrendering to what Foucault famously called `governmentality`. In `governmentality`, typically all grand political visions and promises of statesmanship which generally come to the fore at the time of elections, tend to take the back seat after the government is formed, with the daily mundane bureaucratic and clerical routines of petty file works and other familiar rituals, having their own dynamics, some compelling others born out of vested interests, in this case institutionalised corruption, nepotism etc, taking over charge of governance. With certain variations, this is a universal character of all governments, and to some extent or the other, all lapse into `governmentality`. As has been critiqued by many scholars, it is not as if this `governmentality` is unimportant. Without it, no democratic government can sustain its energy through its entire term. Consequently, it is also true that even if all the politicians take a holiday together at one time, `governmentality` will ensure the government continues to run its routine course, drearily perhaps, but as steadily as it always was.

The difference between one government and another then would be the sustained direction different political leaderships are able to rise about `governmentality`. Ideally, the political leadership should be able to be able to be always on the steering wheel of the government and routinely remind itself of its political mission, and provide direction to the auto pilot governance that `governmentality` provides so conveniently and necessarily. These visions need not only to be refreshed periodically, but also reworked from time to time, in keeping with the demands of the changing times. This will also entail the ability for the political leadership to anticipate future needs and troubles and accordingly seek changes in policy directions. This is exactly where Manipur has failed almost completely very often. The trend has been, after the government has been formed, the rest is left to the auto-pilot governance mechanism, until it runs into big trouble. No need to elaborate on this at least. The present trouble in the wake of the demand for the Inner Line Permit System going violent is the most recent reminder. Now that trouble has broken out, threatening not the least the continuance of government, the political leadership has swung into action, passing and withdrawing bills, holding consultative meetings with legal experts, studying land laws of other states as well as the constitutional permissibility of various proposals on the subjects, etc.

The question is, why did the government have to wait for desperate uprisings on the streets for it to begin considering these changes in policy direction? Why did it not see the people`™s general apprehension of a demographic overturn and pre-empt trouble by seeking the introduction of legislations aimed at regulating this population inflow? If it had been this far-sighted, and before any confrontations with the public became necessary done the needful, probably it would have been able to come up with a more lenient and reasonable law on the matter. Now it is being pushed to do nothing less than the extreme, and in all likelihood would not be able to satisfy most, if not all, whatever it ends up doing. It has also ended up between the proverbial devil and deep sea, for it is unlikely an extremely restrictive law on migrant inflow would not be shot down by the Central government and an extremely soft one would be accepted by the violent and coercive brand of politics on the streets that the state has become so accustomed to. Instead of the political leadership leading from the front, steering the state through calm as well as troubled waters, governance in the state has been more in the nature of stimulus-response equation, in which people are led to take out violent agitations against government inaction on issues they consider as vital and government deciding to respond to these demands when things go out of control.

Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/07/governance-by-demand/

There is a lovely passage in James Joyce`™s `Ulysses` which gives the readers a rather unusual insight into racism. Stephen Dedalus, a protagonist of the novel had just joined a school in his hometown Dublin as a young teacher, and was being teased by his older colleagues, most of whom English, during a casual impromptu meeting on campus. At some point, the conversation digresses to the Jewish problem, with Dedalus`™ older colleagues making irreverent jokes about the community. The young teacher, uneasy and somewhat piqued, excuses himself and leaves. As he walks away, a good natured colleague, in the same jovial tone of the conversation that had been ensuing, calls after Dedalus who halts and looks back. Did you know Ireland is the only country which never had a Jewish problem, he asks the young man, adding, `do you know why?` Impatient but curious, Dedalus awaits the answer. `Because Ireland never allowed the Jews to enter Ireland in the first place`, he said and laughed. This is a paraphrase from memory and it is unlikely to be accurate to details, but the point is, this impish joke contains a valuable insight. It somewhat says the same thing that the familiar old adage does: good fences make good neighbours. It would be good for those sceptical or cynical about the idea of introducing a regulatory mechanism for migrant inflow into Manipur to consider this thought. The ILPS demand does not have to be seen as born out of an essential racial antagonism per se, but as a measure to prevent descent into such a state in the future. If Manipur appears like an ethnic nightmare today, Mizoram and Arunachal Pradesh, with the ILPS is intact, are relatively tranquil. The condition in Nagaland which also has this system is far more complex, as we all know.

Nightmare indeed it has been for the past fortnight, ever since the unfortunate death of Sapam Robinhood, a 16 year old schoolboy on July 8, hit by a police tear gas shell on the face. Street clashes and police brutality became the order of the day until the government decided to take a step back and withdrew an earlier bill which those demanding the ILPS say was at best a placebo. No prizes for guessing that the situation can revert back to hell if things do not work out as planned or desired. What is also loudly evident is that civil society movements can be and has been powerful in Manipur. The rich fund of passion in the society is beyond question. While this is a priceless asset, in the absence of moderation, things can spin out of control into chaos and mayhem. A hint at what can happen under such a circumstance is there for everyone to see in a cell phone video which has gone viral on the internet, in which a burly moral policing Meitei woman bullies and brutally beats up an elderly Nepali woman for using alcohol, patronisingly citing and seeking sanctity of her action in the name of the ILPS agitation. Leaders of the movement must be wary of the fact that the passion on the streets being such, even democracy can transform into what Karl Popper referred to as ugly mobocracy.

This moderation must ideally come from the place`™s intellectual elite. But unfortunately this is where the shadow has always fallen. If it is at all a consolation, there were other places in the world ill of the same malaise as W.B. Yeats noted of Ireland`™s chaotic days, when it became a place `where the best lack all conviction/ and the worst are full of passionate intensity`. Curiously, in August of 2005, in an editorial titled `Silence of the Statesmen` evoked by a similar crisis in the state, the IFP had written how the quality of democracy in Manipur was the loser for the silence of the state`™s statesmen. Others have also picked up and elaborated on the theme in their own writings in the years that followed. It is unfortunate that 11 years later, the vacuum still has not been filled adequately, and we are left complaining again the lack of interest of the national media in the ILPS issue, and therefore a shortfall of understanding of the issue by the larger Indian public as well as policymakers. Unlike in the national media, at home, there are plenty of discussions. But the two are understandably different. Here it is mostly about how the issue should be tackled. For the national media it is the macro picture of what and why the issue is hot. It is sad that the state`™s intelligentsia, especially amongst its Diaspora, have not been able establish bridges with the media in their cities of residence to give their revolutionary thoughts the desired praxis, a term now suddenly in vogue. When it comes to the crux, witty stabs with two liner daggers or even tedious sermons on the social media cannot contribute much to the winds of change sweeping the land.

Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/07/pitfalls-of-passion/

It is difficult to do a running commentary on issues with such deep roots as the indigenous people`™s movement, of which without doubt the current agitation in the valley districts of Manipur is a part. However, difficult though it is, this is precisely the task journalists cannot escape from. It is for this reason that journalism is often referred to as `literature in a hurry`. It is again for the same reason that practitioners of this profession are also as often referred to as the `first draft writers of history`. Despite these limitations, nobody will argue the vital role journalism plays in any society`™s attempt to understand itself and its problems, with a view finally to resolve them. It is perhaps a vindication of the first of these two assertions that many of the best creators of literary works in the world are former journalists, some even going as far to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. There are an equal number of examples of journalists who left their profession and turned to academics and excelled. While on the job however, journalists normally do not have the leisure or the inclination to do scholarly articles needing months of rigorous researches, with referencing and footnotes etc, for they are perpetually chasing very short deadlines.

With this little acknowledgement of limitation of the profession, we want to remind everyone of the need for moderation in the free use of words and concepts such as `indigenous`. The question who is an indigenous person itself has been problematic even for researchers in the field such as Christian Erni. Is this person somebody belonging to a primitive or pre-modern economy? Is he or she a practitioner of traditional, animistic religion? Is he somebody who lives in the wild and therefore stateless in the modern sense? Is a person indigenous only because she is believed to be the original inhabitant of a land? Probably the indigenous person has attributes of some or all of these, and is vulnerable precisely because these attributes are pitted against the encroachment of the modern economy and political system into their spiritual and physical spheres. But, it is quite obvious, each of these attributes are also accompanied by unresolved problems? Take the last postulate that an indigenous person is the original inhabitant of a place. Does this imply he evolved out of the soil and never moved anywhere else? Or is it just a question of his having arrived at his place of settlement earlier than later migrants? What about nomadic people? Do they cease to be indigenous? This problem, as Erni notes in his introduction to the edited volume `The Concept of Indigenous Peoples in Asia` is compounded in Asia where numerous groups contest to be classed as indigenous, unlike say in Europe or America where the dividing lines are much more distinct. To this we are inclined to add, this contest has been made even more complex in India because of the notion of Schedule Tribe and the incentive structuring that comes along with this. Interestingly, in the Indian context, a distinction has emerged between `Schedule Tribe` and `Tribe`, for obviously the two are not identical. One is a technical Constitutional categorisation and the other is a sociological condition? Small wonder then there are communities wanting to come under the ST list, and others, though by any sociological standards cannot anymore be considered a `Tribal`, refusing to forgo the ST status. It is for this reason that the understanding of the concept `indigenous` has to be flexible in places like Manipur. Hence Kukis, Nagas and Meiteis all claim to be `indigenous`, and by Erni`™s definition, all would qualify regardless of belonging to the Indian Constitution`™s ST list or not.

This musing on the volatility of the term `indigenous` is important for one more reason. If a genome study were to be done today, in all likelihood, all Meiteis, all Nagas or all Kukis may not even share the same ancestry even within their communities. Consider the valley. Many traditions, folklores and also semi-scientific studies by colonial writers have pointed out the valley has been a melting pot where different ethnicities descended and merged into a single identity since prehistoric times. Besides the hill tribes, names of many places in the valley also suggest they were early settlements of Kabaw, Awa, Khagi (Chinese), Kege, Pong, Takhel, Tekhao etc. Yale professor James C. Scott vouches this population amalgamation was a prominent feature of his and Willem Scheldel`™s imaginary landscape of `Zomia` (or the mountain massif of upland SE Asia), to which Manipur obviously would belong. The valley dwellers today probably would have the DNA of all these different peoples. If these happened in the pre and proto-historical times, this indigenisation process continued into the historical period too. If not, the Bamon and Pangal would still be aliens. This brings in another thought. If settlers come to colonise, as indeed modern settlers do, and instead of seeking to indigenise they try to marginalise or obliterate the existing indigenous cultures, the danger from the standpoint of the original population is obvious. But if the settlers come and seek to sink into the local milieu and ultimately indigenise, it is equally obvious why leniency must meet them. Those spearheading the movement for introduction of the ILPS must keep this in mind.

Leadert Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/07/colonisation-v-indigenisation/

The current crisis over the demand for the implementation of the Inner Line Permit System, among others, has brought to the fore once again the dilemma of who is a leader. It has also yet again brought out the familiar fissures within the Manipur society. The situation did not have to take any ugly turn for this fissure to become visible. The widely differing levels of concerns for the implementation of the ILPS in the hill districts and the valley is evidence enough. No point in any blame-game, for as they say, this is the way the ball bounces, at least just as yet. It would be futile to pretend things are any other way. The effort in the future should then be to bridge this gap, and the quest have to be for a midway house where the divergent interests can meet, and indeed democracy is the perfect mechanism for deciding where this meeting point should be. The biggest lesson for the valley should be, it is time for it to abandon its horrid presumption of being the natural agency for setting the state`™s political agenda, or to imagine it holds proprietorial guardianship over the state`™s interests. It must take courage to admit to itself that its concerns and aspirations do not have to be shared by all the regions of the state, and that many of its concerns do not spill out too far from the valley. If any issue must be considered as the state`™s interest, it must be by consensus of all sections of the population of the entire state. While democracy is undoubtedly a value, it is its structure which guarantees this value. So let everybody take care to stick by this structure.

The word consensus and consent however must come with some important qualifications. The agitation over the ILPS issue has brought this out to the fore too. Why is it that college and university students seldom are seen in these protest rallies, and in their places are school children in uniform? The explanation probably is that the former have independent minds of their own which will not be easily surrendered to any and every calls by those who presume themselves as leaders. This will be quite unlike school children, who can be flocked out of their schools and paraded without difficulty by the `leaders`. There was a discussion evoked on various internet discussion forums over a column which appeared in a newspaper recently, as to the legitimacy or otherwise of grading leadership quality by the praxis they are able to generate. On such a scale it was also implied that V.I. Lenin was greater than Jurgen Habermas. Curiously, the debates seem to apply in this situation as well. To use Habermas`™ own formulation, the `lifeworld` of school children and that of university students would be markedly different, therefore the nature of the `public space` associated with them would also be very different. Consequently, the challenges before `leaders` to put their theories into practice (praxis), would be radically different, depending on the nature of the different `lifeworld` they are left to deal with. Lenin led a revolution amongst poor and largely illiterate industrial blue collar workers, just as Mao Tse Tung led his revolution amongst poor, illiterate peasants. Habermas`™ `lifeworld` on the other hand is made up of extremely affluent, very well educated, very rich, bankers, academics, technocrats etc, of a very industrialised Western country. He cannot, under the circumstance be expected to lead the kind of revolutions Lenin or Mao led. But Habermas`™ interventions on behalf of Greece in the present crisis the country is in, saying in effect that nationhood of a country should be decided by the citizens of a country and not by the diktats of bankers and technocrats from another country, was revolutionary. The praxis he generates cannot thus be by any standard dismissed as slight. Leading school children and leading university students are two different ball games altogether. We wish our revolutions were of the latter category, but alas this has seldom been.

Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/07/who-leaders-lead/

Plenty of debates had been generated and are still being generated on the explosive issue of preserving the indigenous face of Manipur, especially after the death of a young school boy, Sapam Robinhood, 16. Although initially there were little coming out from mainstream media in the metropolises, now that a denouement is seemingly approaching on the issue of introduction of the ILP, there are indeed stories appearing in the national media, print as well as the TV. It is also encouraging that they have been by and large positive, endorsing the view that while the methods of protest may be questionable the reason for them is not illegitimate. The Inner Line Permit System now being sought in Manipur is an expression of the legitimate existential angst of a small community that it may become drowned in the ocean of the infinitely larger community of continental India. As an article in the Mumbai based Daily News and Analysis, DNA India, today put it, this angst was officially made known by the Nagas as early as 1929, when the then Naga Club presented a memorandum to the Simon Commission, when it came visiting the Naga Hills.

The ILPS is perceived as a means of regulating inflow of migrants, therefore a check on the threat of any radical transformation of demography of the state. While the anxiety is legitimate, it is debatable if the ILP as an instrument which can adequately address this anxiety, for Nagaland which has the ILP is still faced with the same threat of settlers outnumbering the original population, even more than Manipur. But the good thing is, Manipur can fashion its regulatory mechanism modelled on the ILP but it does not have to be the ILP as it exists today, and we do hope those who will now be responsible for the new Bill will be up to the job. They must also take care that the purpose is achieved effectively, but we must reiterate, without unduly victimising any other group. As we see it, ensuring land ownership transfers to non domiciles are next to impossible should serve the purpose to most great extents. This is already the case in the hill districts, and as we are witnessing during the past week of violent agitations, the ILP issue is not taken as so urgent by the hills as it is by the valley, though by and large the concerns for an impending demographic transformations marginalising the local populations, is shared.

There has hardly been anybody in Manipur who rejects totally the need for a migration regulation. Few who did were only recommending variants of the screening mechanism though there was at least one writer who throwing below-the-belt blows to discredit the agitation. In an article in the web magazine, Scroll.in, he so cheaply and communally portrayed the movement as a strategy of the valley Meiteis community in their bid to be included in the Schedule Tribe list so that they may continue have their stranglehold on the state`™s power structure. Although the arguments were puerile and therefore far from coherent or convincing, it is shocking that such venoms also exist. But to make the best of what a grotesque and hideous mind has to say, let the valley begin thinking in terms of seeking consensus first before presuming all its issues by definition are Manipur`™s issues. Even if there is little to doubt that all in the state, and indeed the whole of the Northeast, share the concerns on any issue, let no section of the population, even the smallest, be taken for granted, and assent of each be sought before the issue is billed as `Manipur issue`. This is the democratic way. This is also the only way to bridge the ethnic divides in Manipur.

One more inadequacy came out glaring. From the beginning of the stir, and even after the death of a school boy, one complaint reverberated `“ the national media had no interest in Manipur. But to be fair, maybe they were simply clueless on what or why things were unfolding the way they were. The fault it not just theirs. It is also majorly with the state`™s own intelligentsia, the articulate section of the society, including the media and academics. The state`™s Diaspora is widely spread across the length and breadth of India, and many of them are in the business of idea and knowledge `“ academia. At times like this, it is their moral responsibility to speak up and communicate, not just on the social media, important though it may be, but also the mainstream media for the audience here is much wider. Moreover, what goes on the social media is not peer reviewed therefore still less credible than the media where articles are screened for quality and authenticity by professional editors. Some of us in the local media did do something in the regard, but the voice must be from many, to be heard loudly and convincingly. What is often said of the food chain in the natural world, `eat or be eaten` is also very true of the world of ideas and communication `“ `write or be written about`, or worse still, `write or be written off`.

Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/07/write-or-be-written/

No surprises at all that trying times throw up stories of courage. From Mao Gate to Imphal, from Oinam to Tipaimukh, Manipur has been no stranger to this universal truth that tragedies always have had their shares of heroism. The current crisis is no exception either. The death of Sapam Robinhood, 16, though we wish did not happen and also believe could have been avoided, is a shining example. But if trying times bring out heroism in ordinary men and women, or in Manipur`™s case, more likely young school going boys and girls, there is also often a matching dark side to the story. Selfishness and meanness also show up on the sly to take advantage of the bad situation. No need to name names, for these stories are also as commonplace as the stories of heroism. Just one account should explain the situation. A columnist of a newspaper, using a nom de guerre slyly peered into a discussion on the popular social network on the current crisis unfolding in the state, and instead of joining the discussion and confronting the issue, copy-pasted large parts of the discussion thread and did a critique of it in a tone of ridicule, barely disguising the dramatis personae, therefore virtually amounting to a personality slander of the participants, one in particular. It is likely the writer whose identity is hidden behind the mask of a pen name has a grudge with the object of his ridicule, but this should have remained personal and not a score to be settled on a forum where the opponent has no way of engaging and contesting the innuendos and insinuations immediately. He or she could have done so in response articles, but the damage would already have been done and moreover the nature of these sly slanders is such that though severe injuries are caused, it is difficult to pinpoint any tangible malicious aggression. All the same, this would have been considered despicable and unethical by any standard, and in countries where people`™s privacy is valued and strongly protected by laws specially fashioned to deal with these insinuations, there is no way the slander would have escaped libel suits.

But leave these depressing and uninspiring stories alone for the time being. What we need to focus on now is the way forward to resolve the current crisis. All of us are stakeholders, for indeed the manner in which the issue is resolved, will have a direct bearing on the lives of all of us. There is a wide consensus, that a regulatory mechanism is necessary to protect small populations of distinct peoples from being overwhelmed by settlers from much larger communities. Manipur and indeed the entire Northeast, with its over 250 linguistic communities registered by the Linguistics Survey of India, are vulnerable. Small wonders then the Northeast have become so volatile region prone to murderous ethnic wars. In other words, the fear of alien settlers and cultures (which is what I interpret xenophobia to be, as do the dictionaries, and not what donors driven NGOs have come to portray it to be) amongst the different communities has a good measure of legitimacy. The demand for ILP or another law which takes care of this insecurity hence must be viewed through a sympathetic lens by the state`™s as well as country`™s policy makers. Suitable constitutional amendments can be made to bring this to effect and this should not amount to changing the basic feature of the constitution (which is next to impossible), for the ILP is already in existence, therefore it would be just a matter of extending an existing law and expanding its scopes. But the caveat is, this new law must not result in any undue victimisation of any other community. Even in our deepest crisis, we must never abandon our basic humanism.

One way of achieving the objective at hand is perhaps to look at what we already have. In the agitation for the ILP, the hill districts have been rather aloof, although there is no doubt the concern for demographic marginalisation is shared passionately. This is so because lands in the hills are already protected from transfers to anybody outside the communities inhabiting them therefore the urgency is not felt as strongly as in the valley. Perhaps, instead of the ILP, a legislation which looked to preventing land ownership transfers similarly may serve the purpose much better and with less hurdles to cross in its actualisation. This is just a thought for consideration and not a recommendation.

Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/07/heroism-and-perfidy/

Of the many qualities of a leader, one of the most important is the commitment with which ideals are held and valued. This needs no confirmation from any social scientists, for very often it is common sense that provides the most penetrating insights into issues that have direct and profound bearings into everyday life. And what other thing can have as much impact on everyday life as the quality of leadership any society gets. Ask any man or woman on the streets, literate or otherwise, and they will have the same answer `“ a leader without ideals, or a clear notion of a social goal, is no leader. The other important quality of a leader is, he must have the ability to draw up a clear roadmap as to how his ideals can be actualized. This again is street wisdom as much as it would be an absorbing agenda for highbrow academic seminar rooms and the classrooms of management schools. Do our leaders have these qualities, is an intriguing question. Many of them do, there can be no question about it, but the nagging doubt that arguably all of us would have expressed sometime or the other is, many of them do not seem to possess them. Why then do our voters allow those who lack this quality to return is a question that not many have asked themselves seriously or honestly, hence the recurrence of the phenomenon. The result is, we have many leaders in form only but not in substance. This leadership vacuum is, in our opinion, is at the core of some of the most vexed problems of Manipur, most pertinently, the question of insurgency. For ultimately, ideals are nobody`™s monopoly, and so also leadership, and if one set of leaders are unable to provide it, there will be others who would claim the role. Insurgency in this sense is very much a challenge and contest for this leadership space. Resolving the problem will in the end have also to be about resolving this issue.

But if there is a lack of ideal in the formal political leadership, the contenders lack the form. There can be no argument that all insurrections, including the ones we are witnessed to, are fired by ideals, hence their popular appeals. But the danger here is, when there are no definite forms to the leadership they provide, the ideals themselves come to replace the form. That is to say, the ideals become the system itself, resulting in a mix that have led to the most oppressive dictatorships in history. Stalin, Pol Pot, Trosky, Mao were all idealists, and people still admire their ideals. Their only failure was, they allowed their ideals, and ultimately themselves, to not only substitute the system, but to become the system itself. History bears testimony as to how oppressive ideals without moderation by a formal and objectified roadmap can get. In the modern context, this moderation must have to be looked for in a belief in constitutionalism. This would understandably limit the definition of leadership, for then a leader would have to be how the consensual constitution defines what a leader is, how he is to be selected and how deposed etc. In mature Western democracies, such as for instance England, we do hear of such stories as how even former Prime Minister Tony Blair, while still in office, have had to visit police station to face questioning by the officer-in-charge, and complete mandatory calls of the law for the drunken driving of his son etc. Nobody in this part of the world would not be amused or wonderstruck by such accounts of the law, and the clear perimeters it draws around this definition of leadership, but on second though, we are left convinced that such respect for constitutionalism is the only path that can keep men entrusted with power from becoming despotic dictators. If the form can dilute and destroy ideals, as is happening in our formal politics of today, an overflow of ideals can subsume the form, if the ideals are not drawn within the guidelines of a definite and institutionalized constitutionalism. The latter, it must be admitted, is one of the bane of the leadership of the non-official kind, in fact the insurgency movements in our region. The challenge of leadership then is, to have the ideals as well as the system `“ but separate from each other and one moderating the other.

Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/07/danger-of-ideal-as-system/

Tragedy has struck again in Manipur`™s absurd theatre. This time the victim is a 16 year old school boy Sapam Robinhood who has fallen victim to disproportionate use of force by the state police. Making it even grimmer is the fact that this is a tragedy foretold, for tacitly it was being nudged on by the society at large, including the state`™s intelligentsia. Just one simple fact should highlight this contention. The boy killed today is a minor, and by international standards of democratic decision making, he would still not qualify to vote in a democratic election. In other words, he would have been considered still not of age to be in politics or political decision making. And by similar international standards of law, still too young to even hold a driving license. It is just the boy`™s bad luck that he was the one hit this time, but it could have been any of the other school boy or girl, some of them even younger than him, who became the unfortunate cannon fodder in the agitation over an issue of extreme political gravity `“ that of preventing what is seen with a measure of public hysteria, the impending upsetting of the demographic balance of the state in the face of influx of populations from outside.

The issue of demography is nothing to be trivialised. This is especially so in a democracy where power is directly proportional to and indeed determined by demographic constitution of a polity. It is therefore important for the political class to address the matter seriously in order to make democracy meaningful and trouble free. It would be worth recalling here that in many different ways, modern India is not new to demography politics. The words of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, who too had campaigned for a communal division of the Indian electorate, with a separate electorate for the Untouchables (Dalits) in the 1930s, was actually saying this. His logic for such a `communal politics` was not at all communal as Arundhati Roy argues passionately in a recent article in the EPW titled `All the World`™s a Half-Built Dam`. Ambedkar`™s concern was that the Untouchables will never be able to have a representative in the elected legislature as their population are spread out thin all over India and not concentrated into any tangible constituency, hence the need for a separate electorate for them for some time. `When British Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald accepted this proposal and announced the Communal Award granting the Untouchables a separate electorate for a period of 20 years, Gandhi went on his historic fast to death in the Yerawada prison, demanding the provision be revoked. Ambedkar was coerced into backing down and eventually, on 24 September 1932 he signed the notorious Poona Pact,` Roy points out, deriding Gandhi for not appreciating the superior vision of Ambedkar.

The agitation in Manipur for the implementation of the Inner Line Permit System, or an equivalent law, is also about demography, and in a related way as Ambedkar saw it, about enriching democracy by ensuring even the smallest population sections do not end up marginalised. It does not have to be the ILPS, for the ILPS`™ efficacy or its colonial legacies are of doubtful integrity. The important point however is, the issue needs to be addressed and tackled in a befitting manner. Preferably a legislation which takes care of this legitimate apprehension, without of course victimising any other community, is the need of the hour. For such an outcome however, an enlightened political class and the intelligentsia must step forward to shoulder the responsibility. Unfortunately, both these classes have either been abdicating their responsibilities or else are absolutely clueless. The emotionally blinded rhetorical nature of debates on the issue the state has become familiar with by now, with little or no empirical substance validating the claims made, are just one example. But the bigger proof of this abdication is the pitiable parading of school children in uniform during agitations for these political issues. From the time of Socrates to the current momentous decision of Greece to say `No` to the hegemony of European Capital, all meaningful revolutions of ideas in the world have incubated and germinated in the universities. Why have the faculties of our universities been remaining so indifferent to these issues and have virtually ceased to be similar incubators of ideas and initiators of revolutions? Can a state which leaves these matters to be taken to the streets by school children ever be considered progressive? The fatal injury of a 16 year old boy today on the street is tragic. But the bigger tragedy of Manipur is the absolute cluelessness of those who wear the mantle of intellectual elite to come up with any tangible answer, and the political leadership`™s inability to lead from the front.

Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/07/manipurs-tragedy/

The recent advertisement calling for candidacy to the important post of Director of the Regional Institute of Medical Sciences, RIMS, is once again poised to kick up an unseemly controversy. For reasons that are flimsy at best, the age of superannuation of the Director`™s post has been lowered to 62 years, professedly `as per existing RR`, without any prior notice, putting many senior professors of this prestigious medical institute and health service provider out of the competition unceremoniously. The superannuation age had earlier been raised to 65 years from 62 years by the 42nd meeting of the Executive Council of the RIMS held on August 5, 2011, at the Nirman Bhavan, New Delhi. This was in keeping with similar raises in the superannuation age for the Directors of AIIMS, PGIMER Chandigarh, NEGRIHMS Shillong and JIMPER, thus bringing the norms of the RIMS on the matter at a par with other medical institutes under the administrative control of Ministry of Health & Family Welfare. This decision of 2011 was ratified and confirmed in the next sitting of the RIMS Executive Council a year later on August 22, 2012. The Ministry of Health & Family Welfare had also in a notification dated May 3, 2012, clearly stated its approval that the term of office of the Director of the RIMS shall be `five years or till the incumbent attains the age of 65, whichever is earlier`. It is despite all these developments over a span of nearly four years that the advertisement for the RIMS Director`™s post released by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare on June 24, 2015, without bothering to extend any credible explanation, reverted the superannuation age to the previous 62 years.

Clearly this rather unusual decision calls for an explanation by the ministry`™s concerned authorities. The vaguely implied reason in its advertisement is, though the superannuation age had been raised to 65 years, no recruitment rules, RR, for this change in age ceiling had been framed yet, therefore the resort to the earlier ceiling of 62 years for which an RR does exist. If this indeed is the explanation for the age lowering, it must be said the logic is not tenable. The decision to raise the age ceiling was taken in August 2011, therefore there can be no excuse that a new RR had not been framed for the post as yet. In any case, framing one should hardly have been of any difficulty and could have been achieved in a matter of a week or two. This is especially so in consideration of the fact that the Director`™s posts of several other matching medical institutes in the country under the same ministry, including the AIIMS and NEGRIHMS had also been given such a raise of superannuation age, and RRs for the new 65 year age ceiling for these other institutes would be available for the RIMS to adopt or else model its own RR on.

In the name of fair play, and so as to dispel all doubts and suspicions that there are vested interests trying to take undue advantage, the ministry must put the matter on hold for the time being by withdrawing its advertisement of June 24. A new advertisement can be released after the issue has been put to rest conclusively and to the satisfaction of all parties and stakeholders. As it is, the RIMS has been in the throes of several image battering traumatic experiences in the wake of several unsavoury controversies descending on it in the last few years. Surely the health ministry would not like to add one more distressful episode to the list of the RIMS`™ already overflowing cup of woes. If it does push ahead with the unexplained lowered superannuation age in the recruitment of the next Director of the RIMS, in all likelihood the prestigious institute would be dragged into yet another wasteful and image eroding court battle. Our suggestion to the ministry therefore is for it to either explain its seeming arbitrary decision convincingly to the public, or else if it is unable to do this, delay the appointment a little until this emerging potential controversy is defused. This will save the RIMS another nasty blow to its reputation.

Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/07/rims-controversy/

Imagine a land where there is no law. If that is possible, you are either in the amazing dream world of Lewis Carroll`™s Alice in Wonderland, which we all have read either in the original or else as abridged versions of it, or more likely in illustrated comic books. Or else you are in the other wonderland called Manipur. It is quite a parallel too. In Carroll`™s wonderland, the characters make law as and when they need it `“ so too in Manipur. There is supposed to be something as an established constitutional law in force, but that law today has receded into the background, thanks to its keepers who have either lost interest in it or else have become a law unto themselves. Instead, what are actually and most tangibly at work are on the spot laws, un-edified and untenable in any court of law, and made by any and everybody as and when they please. Leave aside the underground organisations which are pretty straightforward in their stand, claiming to be challengers of the established law as such, for other than them, the law and its enforcement have become a free for all agenda. What is absolutely confounding is, the government seems not to mind this at all when it should actually have been treating the matter as an insult to its authority. Reams after reams of commentary have been written on this and yet, not a single word or idea seems to have registered, and things continue as they always were, spiralling deeper and deeper into the abyss. What exactly is it that the government wants, can it please spell it out so that the people at least would know what to expect from it? Not that they expect much anyway, for proof of this the government just needs to look at the advertisement spaces of vernacular dailies and discover who the people are looking up with awe in matters of crime and punishment.

There are also people getting summarily executed in frightful regularity by all sorts of people who claim to have the law in their hands. Sometimes the guilt of these unfortunate victims are pronounced after they are dead and gone. Like in the haunting command line of the Queen in Alice in Wonderland `Off With His Head`, pronounced every now and then, with no apparent forethought or afterthought, and said as if by rote absolutely at random, it probably occurred to somebody somewhere that somebody else was guilty and passed a verdict in one of the on-the-spot piece of legislation. If the government needs any reminder it should feel guilty for these incidents, it should look at the helpless and muted protests on the streets against these atrocities, marked by the apparitions of womenfolk in ceremonial white, with fruit baskets in front and placards spelling out their protests resting on the side, performing what has come to be known as `wakat mipham`. Elsewhere, school buildings are being razed, hospitals are being stoned, bans are being imposed, `taxes` are being levied, shops are being shut down and the list of woes can carry on endlessly. All these are perpetrated by known and unknown players, but seldom ever named even if known. And the government still continues to turn the other way, pretending it has no eyes, ears or mouth. It does however with zest climbs the podium at every opportunity, talking of the virtues of democracy and democratic rule. What a miserable irony. It is bewildering and frustrating to know that all complaints and cries of lament have seldom made a difference, or is hardly likely fall on attentive ears of those who can make the difference.

Despite all this, people however still want to believe in the established institutions of constitutional law with clearly prescribed and edified procedures, as opposed to arbitrary decrees. Hence, here is our appeal once again to the Manipur government to please get its acts together. While it is evolving a peace policy on the issue of insurgency, at least take control of the home front and ensure things do not descend into complete madness. For this, it must first of all establish its presence and prove its credibility. Let its focus come back to good governance. Let ministership become an important and powerful tool of governance, and not the goal itself, as has so long been. Let it lead by example and not merely appeal to the people to be law abiding and diligent. And most important of all, let it clearly demarcate what portion of law keeping is its sole prerogative and what areas it can share or outsource to private parties, if at all this is proper or essential. Failing this, it cannot blame anybody else but itself for the resultant chaos.
Leader Writer: Pradip Phanjoubam

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2015/07/revisiting-wonderland/