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

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

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

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

This editorial is prompted by reprimands from readers and well wishers who pointed out the insensitivity shown by the IFP in publishing the vividly clear picture of a raped and murdered girl some days ago on its front page. We do apologise for the serious slip, and hope not to repeat the mistake again. Our excuse is the usual. In the late evening rush hours of newspaper production, sometimes it is difficult to keep out the printer’s devil from playing havoc. Everybody who has had a formal academic course in journalism would have been told of this in their classes and also shown glaring bloomers even in very reputed newspapers in the past. But as we said this is only an excuse of a mistake we have made but not by any means an indicator we will continue to be lax in guarding against such insensitivities slipping past our news and image vetting procedures. This brings to the fore one other concern. As in academics, journalists too need to be put through occasional refresher courses in new developments in the professions as well as standards of general ethics which undoubtedly have a profound bearing on the discharge of their duty. After all, although in a different way, much of the terms of conduct of this profession too are cerebral in nature.

The Department of Information and Public Relations, DIPR, government of Manipur has a fortnight long certificate journalism training course each year with the objective of grooming young men and women on the threshold of choosing a career to develop an interest in the profession by getting them to have a glimpse of its inner dynamics. Senior journalists in the state are the resource persons for these annual events and the trainees are taught the classical definitions as well as practical problems of the profession. While this is a good effort, the point to be noted is, not many of those who undergo these courses ever join the profession. At the local level, the working conditions of the profession cannot match government jobs, so the brighter ones normally opt for the latter. Indeed many of them enlist in the DIPR courses for the certificate in the hope this would enhance their chances of getting into “any government job”, even a grade three or four one. The quality of education in the state being such, not many of them would also be able to match their competitors from many other states for journalistic jobs in the open market in better paying environs of other Indian metropolises.

This being the scenario, we would like to suggest that it would be much more profitable for the DIPR course to be converted to a refresher course for working journalists. The lectures then would not necessarily have be about news gathering or newspaper production, but can have a much larger parameter. As for instance, the course could orient itself towards issues like gender sensitivity, child rights, human rights, law, or for that matter grassroots welfare programmes of the State as well as Central governments, all of which the profession has to deal with, and all of which undoubtedly would have a strong bearing on the quality as well as efficacy of journalism in the state. The government could also tie up with the Manipur University, which already has a journalism department, and conduct such refresher courses periodically. Such an arrangement would be ideal, for the resource persons, not just in journalism but also in the other subjects of relevance to the profession would be readily available. Besides the government, we wonder if it would not be possible for some of the well-funded NGOs to hold lesser versions of the courses by way of workshops and media seminars. While there is a profusion of NGOs in the state working in the areas of HIV/AIDS, environment, gender issues, conflict resolution, we wonder what is keeping a sound media NGO from materialising here. Nobody will doubt how important the media in a situation such as Manipur’s, and in fact, the media’s relevance is also profound in the success of the campaigns by NGOs working in the above named fields. So these media refresher courses could become part of their overall programmes. How for instance could an average reporter know the nuanced issues involved in HIV/AIDS, environment or gender reporting? What is not understood is, few if any journalists in any newspaper in the state, and indeed in most media organisations anywhere, get to specialise in any particular field and thus they all tend to be generalists. The pitfall of this predicament is what the IFP is also having to apologise in this editorial.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2011/09/to-refresh-journalism/

When it comes to gender equality, Manipur is a land of contradiction. In many ways Manipuri women are much more liberated. Traditionally they have been economically independent and as in any agrarian society, they participated in the same occupations as their men folks. This is except in matters of soldiering, and there are in fact explanations that traditionally women in the state are vitally involved economic activities and in keeping the family hearth burning precisely because at times of wars, able bodied men automatically were conscripted into the state’s fighting forces. Since wars and raids were frequent, it became essential for the women to fill in and do the needful to keep the economy of the place standing. That the tradition of women shouldering the major part of the responsibility of taking care of family needs has hung on even after the advent of the modern economy is a failure of the tradition from growing with the demands of the time thus making itself anachronistic and redundant. What is also true is, while a traditional woman in Manipur would be much more independent and liberated than a traditional woman in most other parts of sub-continental India, the same is hardly true of the modern woman. Manipur, and indeed the entire northeast would fall far behind in this. Just considering the example of women leaders who emerge on the political horizon would be evidence. Again, the power of women in Manipur in the traditional sense is witnessed in the Meira Paibi movement, the most recent climactic demonstration of this power was on July 15, 2004 at the Kangla Gate in the now famous naked protest by 15 women. In many ways Irom Sharmila is another demonstration of this same phenomenon.

It is in the transition of this traditional strength to the modern incarnation of the Manipuri woman that the curtain has fallen. For evidence, look at the Manipur State Legislative Assembly. In the current one, there is only one woman MLA, and this too almost by default. Had the lady not been the wife of the chief minister, Okram Ibobi, it is unlikely she would have made it. In this sense, it can almost be said the lone seat occupied by a lady was won by the chief minister and thus it is his second seat in the Assembly. In other words, there is a woman in the Assembly only in form but in spirit it is a man’s seat, making it not altogether incorrect to say that in actuality there is no independent woman representative in the current Assembly. Compare this with traditionally conservative states like Rajasthan, Bengal, Tamil Nadu etc. These states have seen towering women leaders who even rose to the position of chief ministers. Is such a situation thinkable in Manipur, Nagaland, Mizoram, Assam, Tripura, Arunachal Pradesh or for that matter Meghalaya, where women are supposed to have always occupied an especially powerful place in a matrilineal social structure? Something is just not right and this calls for right advocacy and intervention.

The trouble perhaps is also about a hangover from a patriarchal feudal past and the inability of the modern to overcome it. The values of this patriarchal order are ingrained deep in the society and its proponents incidentally are not always men. Women are equally responsible for its perpetration. This latter point is in two ways. One, in the manner Jean Paul Sartre explains in his introduction to Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth” where he says through generations of oppression the oppressed begins to believe in his or her own degradation. She then identifies her own detested self image in others in similar predicament as her. Thus, it is often the mother-in-law and the sister-in-law who are the meanest and cruellest to the daughter-in-law. The other way this social inequality is perpetrated is by an internalised self interest of the feminine gender. This internalisation has become almost an intuition. Evidence of this is seen practically every day whenever a woman thinks it fit to project herself as the weaker sex, and as if by rights guaranteed by this status, insists on jumping long queues outside bank counters and ATM machines. True the patriarchal order is also zealously guarded by men who like to see their women as cultural show pieces, dressed and groomed the way they want, and behaving as helpless dependents they can lord over as chivalrous defenders. All these hypocrisy on the part of the feminine gender and the hegemonic stupidity of the strutting males in Manipur must first change before a radical transformation capable of bringing about a parity of power in the relationship between the two genders can come about.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2011/09/elusive-gender-equality/

The murder of two non local immigrants was dastardly to say the least. Such crimes in the last few years, it is now clear, is not random but falls into a definite pattern. Even as the state is reeling under the impact of the economic blockade, anti-social elements are adding insult to injury by their atrocious and unthinking acts. The crime must be roundly condemned. In any case, xenophobia is no solution to whatever genuine concerns of possible demographic overturning caused by unregulated inflow of immigrants, economic or political. The government must ensure that the vulnerable sections of the society are given adequate protection to their life and property. It is very unfortunate that these ugly incidents have been periodically resurfacing in this beleaguered state. It is also unfortunate that between one massacre and the next, the government has not been able to evolve any farsighted policies to tackle the problem conclusively. All it has been doing is to fire fight, which quite obviously, to use a medical analogy, is merely in the nature of sedative but far from being a cure to the disease. So as in the past, the administration has, as a response to the most recent racial attack, herded non local immigrants to camps it set up and given them police cover. But the question is for how long can this be for? This is especially relevant because those housed in the camps are mostly impoverished daily wage earners and outside their places of work would be deprived of their meagre earnings. Sooner than later, by the compulsions of poverty, they would want to be released so that they can return to their places of work, and that is when the cycle of hate violence would likely be repeated soon as the public and government vigil drop.

The moot point is, while the government must do what it is doing now by making the security cover foolproof, it must also think of evolving longer term strategies to tackle this growing menace of xenophobic hate crimes. While it is a few miscreants who are responsible for these crimes, what is to be remembered is the crimes are the extreme manifestation of a general atmosphere of concern amongst the a good section of the population of the state that immigrants would come to outnumber the indigenous populations sooner than later. It may be recalled that so many powerful and well known civil organisations, have expressed this anxiety in no uncertain terms and indeed there is a parallel increase in the decibel in the demands for the re-introduction of the inner line permit system which would restrict immigration as well as prevent transfer of landed property to immigrants. A longer term solution to the problem would have to address this concern and seek to resolve or moderate it. If such an approach is not taken, the government would be left with no other option than to resort to the same strategy of bolting the stable after the horses have fled. This would be unforgivable for the matter involves lives and any loss of life is nothing to be callous about.

But what manifests as a concern of possible demographic imbalances may have a strong unarticulated component of competition for jobs. As had been written and thrashed so many times even on these same columns, immigrant labour always manages to drag down wages earning the ire of the local labour market. The fact that those the miscreants targeted were impoverished immigrant labourers may in fact be an indicator of this contention. Some years ago, the reason for the attacks in Assam on “Hindi speakers” was openly stated to be an outcome of competition for railway jobs of grade three and two. In Maharashtra the underlying causes for the attacks on non-Maharashtrians were also for the same reason. We are pointing out these possible factors so that the government does not miss them out in evolving its own long term strategy of tackling this ugly and shameful problem. Just to underscore the point, the government cannot afford to let its guards down in the immediate context for there are killers out there bent on creating xenophobic mayhem. They must be kept at bay. However the government should also think of some regulatory mechanism to check the inflow of immigrants. It must be acknowledged that beneath the loathsome xenophobia are some genuine concerns which must be taken care of. As the saying goes, good fences make good neighbours. At this point perhaps introducing such a regulatory mechanism, even if a mild one, is this good fence. It is needless to remind the government that such regulatory mechanisms exist in many other Northeast states.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2011/09/dastardly-crime/