DC inaugurates six day leadership training at CCpur

LAMKA, April 26: Deputy Commissioner, Churachandpur PK Jha today inaugurated a six day Leadership Development Training for the Minority Women of the district at Lailamveng Lamka. During the function, the

LAMKA, April 26: Deputy Commissioner, Churachandpur PK Jha today inaugurated a six day Leadership Development Training for the Minority Women of the district at Lailamveng Lamka.

During the function, the DC had also launched the official website of the Action for Women and Child Development.

Today’s program was attended by around 25 trainees.

MDC, CCpur, Grace Zamnu also attended today’s function.

Grace Zamnu said the program is being sponsored by the Ministry of Minority Affairs envisaging provision of training to 125 women of the district in different fields.

She said the trainees are divided into five batches of 25 trainees each to be trained at different venues.

25 trainees are taking part in the program which was inaugurated today to be conducted at the AWCA office near the SAS in Lailam Veng, Lamka, she said.

Another batch of 25 women had been already received the training at Munhoih Village in different activities like embroidery, weaving and other trades, she added.

“The remaining training programs will be held at Singat Block and then in other blocks,” she asserted.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2014/04/dc-inaugurates-six-day-leadership-training-at-ccpur/

World Intellectual Property Day observed

IMPHAL, April 27: Patent Information Centre (PIC) of Manipur Science & Technology Council (MASTEC), Imphal and the Department of Pharmacology, Jawaharlal Nehru Institute Medical Sciences, Porompat, Imphal have jointly observed

IMPHAL, April 27: Patent Information Centre (PIC) of Manipur Science & Technology Council (MASTEC), Imphal and the Department of Pharmacology, Jawaharlal Nehru Institute Medical Sciences, Porompat, Imphal have jointly observed the World Intellectual Property Day – 2014 today to mark the existence of World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) at the Department of Pharmacology, JNIMS, Porornpat, Imphal, said it in a press release.

The main objectives of this event are to raise awareness of how patents, copyrights, trademarks and designs impact on daily life, to increase understanding of how protecting IP rights helps promote creativity and innovation, to celebrate creativity and contribution made by creators and innovators to the development of societies across the globe and to encourage respect for the IP rights of others, it said.

The theme of the World Intellectual Property Day – 2014 was “Movies – A Global Passion”. Th Surendranath Singh, Director, MASTEC and Prof Th Imoba Singh, Head, Department of pharmacology, JNIMS were on the dais.

Surendranath delivered a talk on Intellectual Property Rights (IPR). Faculty members and students attended the programme, it said.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2014/04/world-intellectual-property-day-observed/

KAM condemns bomb attack to deputy speaker

IMPHAL, April 26: The Kickboxing Association of Manipur (KAM) and the North-East Association of Kickboxing Organisations (NEAKO), India strongly condemned the bomb attack on the life of Deputy Speaker, Manipur

IMPHAL, April 26: The Kickboxing Association of Manipur (KAM) and the North-East Association of Kickboxing Organisations (NEAKO), India strongly condemned the bomb attack on the life of Deputy Speaker, Manipur M K Preshow Shimray who is the president of the Associations, said it in press release.

It further said that M K Preshow Shimray was attack at Litan on the April 9 last and added that M K Preshow Shimray is a person of such a character who has sacrificed his life for the land and its people especially the sports persons. So, the Associations respectfully appeal the concerned not to repeat such act in the future, it said.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2014/04/kam-condemns-bomb-attack-to-deputy-speaker/

Manipur Maoist calls 12 hour general strike on Apr 29 – KanglaOnline

Manipur Maoist calls 12 hour general strike on Apr 29KanglaOnlineIMPHAL, April 26: The Maoist Communist Party, Manipur has called a general strike from 5am to 5pm of April 29 against the proposed visit of the Indian President to attend the Convocation …

Manipur Maoist calls 12 hour general strike on Apr 29
KanglaOnline
IMPHAL, April 26: The Maoist Communist Party, Manipur has called a general strike from 5am to 5pm of April 29 against the proposed visit of the Indian President to attend the Convocation Ceremony of the Manipur University, according to a statement of

Read more / Original news source: http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&ct2=us&usg=AFQjCNFmQMCHyRhCopeRN_l5msg7xhmoMQ&clid=c3a7d30bb8a4878e06b80cf16b898331&ei=6oRdU4iINIfd8AHpkQE&url=http://kanglaonline.com/2014/04/manipur-maoist-calls-12-hour-general-strike-on-apr-29/

Army recruitment rally for youth of Nagaland, Manipur – Nagaland Post

Army recruitment rally for youth of Nagaland, ManipurNagaland PostAn army recruitment rally primarily for the youth of Nagaland and Manipur has been scheduled on May 15 to 25 at Football Ground, Kendriya Vidhyalaya, Leimakhong, district Senapati (Manip…

Army recruitment rally for youth of Nagaland, Manipur
Nagaland Post
An army recruitment rally primarily for the youth of Nagaland and Manipur has been scheduled on May 15 to 25 at Football Ground, Kendriya Vidhyalaya, Leimakhong, district Senapati (Manipur). Vacancies are available for candidates from Manipur and …

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Army recruitment rally for youth of Nagaland, Manipur – Nagaland Post

Army recruitment rally for youth of Nagaland, ManipurNagaland PostAn army recruitment rally primarily for the youth of Nagaland and Manipur has been scheduled on May 15 to 25 at Football Ground, Kendriya Vidhyalaya, Leimakhong, district Senapati (Manip…

Army recruitment rally for youth of Nagaland, Manipur
Nagaland Post
An army recruitment rally primarily for the youth of Nagaland and Manipur has been scheduled on May 15 to 25 at Football Ground, Kendriya Vidhyalaya, Leimakhong, district Senapati (Manipur). Vacancies are available for candidates from Manipur and …

Read more / Original news source: http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&ct2=us&usg=AFQjCNH1bcR9yrDivIDwiCVazADkhqy8Ig&clid=c3a7d30bb8a4878e06b80cf16b898331&ei=2UleU5CyM6aV8QGMJA&url=http://www.nagalandpost.com/channelnews/State/StateNews.aspx?news=TkVXUzEwMDA1ODg0MA%253D%253D

BJP blasts Govt over Manipur water crisis – Assam Tribune

E-Pao.netBJP blasts Govt over Manipur water crisisAssam TribuneIMPHAL, April 26 – The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Manipur Pradesh has blasted the ruling Congress Government in Manipur for their failure to tackle the ongoing water crisis in the State…


E-Pao.net

BJP blasts Govt over Manipur water crisis
Assam Tribune
IMPHAL, April 26 – The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) Manipur Pradesh has blasted the ruling Congress Government in Manipur for their failure to tackle the ongoing water crisis in the State. The BJP alleged that the government plans on water supply to
Water crisis throws life out of gear in ImphalTimes of India
Water shortage is manmade, due to `Policy Paralysis`: BJPKanglaOnline

all 8 news articles »

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Book Review – Keeping War: Stale-mate on a `Durable Disorder`

By Soibam Haripriya Highway 39 snakes its way through three states –Assam, Nagaland and Manipur, its winding path could be a metaphor for a river though it is literally a

By Soibam Haripriya

Highway 39 snakes its way through three states –Assam, Nagaland and Manipur, its winding path could be a metaphor for a river though it is literally a slush in the monsoons especially the part of the highway that fall within the territory of  Manipur. The title of the book, Highway 39, gives the picture of a road trip. However, the book is refreshingly nuanced unlike other recent books on the still persistent idea of the ‘northeast’, many of which for various political reasons juxtapose the two states –Nagaland and Manipur as two antagonistic entities. It was another book reviewed in the same paper ‘Che in Paona Bazaar’ that led me to look at the books published in the past few years on what one might provisionally call ‘the same terrain’.

Highway 39 is not disappointing, and unlike the former it is non voyeuristic in its gaze. One may find the writer’s views critical but he gives convincing arguments and anecdotes in support of his criticism. Rather than brush aside the responsibility of the state and its complicity in what ails the region and many other regions in periphery/ies, Chakravarti is clear on the role of the government and the mechanism of governance.  In the introduction of the book he says ‘Governance plummets if the place is both far enough from New Delhi and lacks the heft of population to contribute sufficient numbers to the equation of government formation in New Delhi’ (ix). The idea of refusing to engage with some of the most pressing problems that the region faces, most important among which is governance; and insurgency being propped up as an easy answer to all that ills the region is part of many writings both academic and other non-fiction accounts. To link both –governance and insurgency, the former leading to the latter and the latter as both encouraged and fragmented by a certain investment in it as part of governance strategy is alluded to by him. What marks the two books as starkly different is that ‘Che in Paona Bazaar’ is a book that seems to make a passing casual remark at issues that should be dealt with more seriously, for instance insurgency is callously referred to by Bhattacharjee as ‘Insurgency is complex, at the same time boring to elaborate’.

I am afraid that there is no escaping the comparison of the two books published just a year apart as they more or less describe the same region but in ways which are starkly different, not to mention that some of the informants are common to both the writers. The latter fact perhaps points to larger issues of using the same laid out routes and there being a set pattern in understanding an issue. However, this also points to the fact that the same event may not necessarily convey the same to different people; the ‘ways of seeing’ is definitely different. Chakravarti does not use any protagonist, fictional or otherwise, running through the book, it is him and the people he encounters and yet he offers more than an insight at each experience of meeting people or being there where truth collides with lies and conspiracies – ‘Travel here means confronting the truths, lies and bloodshed that have shaped modern India. It means confronting the reality that people whom I was instructed to revere since my childhood, names we as Indians read as streets, stadia and institutes of learning, faces we saw in history books and on increasingly rare postage stamps, treated other citizens –with brutality that rivalled any other in these modern times’ (p.4).

The book also raises pertinent questions of the reconciliation and peace processes; the inter-linking of faith (in one particular religion) and enmeshing it with identity especially on the Nagaland-Nagalim questions that perhaps those involved need to ask of themselves. This and the intrigues played out by the state had been largely ignored by Bhattacharjee. Chakravarti says this and most people would endorse that ‘It is indeed no secret that India’s intelligence services and the home ministry play the game every which way with each faction, and try to tap into separate points of leverage within each faction by using those with political ambition’ (p. 61). Many other such facts that characterise what is called ‘the economy of conflict’, politics of doling out ‘package’ has been discussed at length.

The book is in parts a juxtaposition of different events that lend an unmistakable air of irony – a billboard of a Manipuri film –Bomb Blast in Imphal; Mohandas Gandhi on a truck that reads ‘Sanitation is more important than independence’ brings to mind a statement by the C.M. of Manipur who once in an interview with Tehelka magazine said `Education is more important than right to life` or the most poignant irony of the pomp of building a martyrs’ memorial on the one hand and Luingamla’s grave ( a young girl killed for resisting attempts to rape in 1986,  a story which the writer followed to and fro –from official gazettes to different villages) unkempt and without a marker just as the official gazettes hovered between life imprisonment and acquittal and finally the gazette itself abruptly ended without a closure.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2014/04/book-review-keeping-war-stalemate-on-a-durable-disorder/

Book extract / Rivers, River Valleys, Mountains as integral region

By Pradip Phanjoubam Here is another extract from another chapter of my forthcoming book written as a fellow of the IIAS, Shimla. Here too the citations and footnotes have been

By Pradip Phanjoubam

Here is another extract from another chapter of my forthcoming book written as a fellow of the IIAS, Shimla. Here too the citations and footnotes have been removed to suit newspaper style.

Comprehending conflicts has never been easy. If this was not so, much of the conflicts witnessed in Northeast India today would have been, to use a cliché, history. Here, they have not only lingered, but become progressively much more complex as well. There would obviously be many reasons for this, as indeed all complex human issues would, and the modest object of this chapter, and the book, is to try and size up some of the vitally important ones, particularly those which often have gone unnoticed, largely because of their intangible natures. One of the hurdles in the effort to size up and understand the dynamics behind conflicts has been the tendency to oversimplify, using in most cases only tangible barometers available to assess the issues at hand. Unfortunately, this strategy of conflict resolution, which for the sake of simplicity I refer to as the bureaucratic approach, is not just a bane of the State’s bureaucracy machinery alone, but also of the mindset of a greater section of the intelligentsia. What is forgotten in the process, are the intangible factors which seldom register on the accustomed radars that feed the cognitive faculties of the State as a whole, as also its various official executive apparatuses of governance.

Tangible indexes such as unemployment rates, income, education, GDP growth rate, road connectivity etc, are no doubt very important, but they are by no means everything there is to know or tackle about the problems of conflicts of the nature the Northeast has become stymied by. It is the contention of this study that they may not even be as fundamental as the intangibles which remain unnoticed or else sidelined as secondary and insignificant. This introductory chapter then is meant to sketch the broad conceptual frame within which the rest of the chapters of this book will be located.

The nature of relationships between rivers, river valleys and the mountains where these rivers originate, and the way they shape the psychology of inhabitants of their geographical reaches, is one of these intangibles, and I shall take a survey of some well known cases in the Indian sub-continent, the logics of which will help in understanding some of the internal dynamics of the conflicts in the Northeast too. The proposition then is, river valleys and the surrounding mountains form an integral geography and any effort to disrupt this integrity will cause political and social turmoil.

In a deliberate twist of the familiar piece of trite but insightful observation, English geographer W. Gordon East, said ‘nature imposes and man disposes’ thereby ‘…man’s actions are limited by the physical parameters imposed by geography’. While geography is a given, and politically value neutral, humans who come to settle in any particular geographical region have to come to terms with the interrelatedness of different regions, not just from the ecological point of view, but much more importantly and immediately, from their own primal outlook to security and survival. They therefore attribute their values to geography. Most of the time, these values exist at the level of instinctual understandings, manifesting in myths and legends, religions and beliefs, superstitions and taboos. But very often, they have also manifested as very tangible political issues with tremendous potentials for triggering deadly conflicts. Indeed, such politics predetermined by geography have more often than not been behind many, if not most intractable conflicts all over the world. History is replete with examples, the Nile basin and the Mekong basin to cite just two, but the list can go on. The Mekong example is interesting, for here the Asian Development Bank, ADB, has actually taken cognizance of the significance of viewing the entire river basin as economically, ecologically, psychologically and politically integral, therefore inseparable region. Its ambitious Greater Mekong Sub-region, GMS, project is the articulation of this philosophy and the degree of success this project has met in integrating the economy of the entire region, and with it fostering a new level of cooperation between what in recent history have been five mutually hostile, though culturally related, impoverished nations, is a vindication of this postulate. But even within the same country, these conflicts over river waters and river valleys can get bitter, as India has seen in the Cauvery water dispute.

Without digressing any further from the central focus of this chapter, let me return to a political phenomenon, closer to India and with immediate relevance to its security – the Karakash and Yarkand river basins and their contiguous territory, the Aksai Chin plateau and beyond. This is not any effort to size up the dispute over this territory between India and China, or to be judgmental about it, but to illustrate the original contention of this chapter, that of the integral nature of river valleys and the surrounding mountains. As to the tangible significance of this intangible friction, it is loudly and disastrously evident in the fact that it has resulted in a brief and tragic war between India and China in 1962. The subject has attracted plenty of political rhetoric and posturing whenever skirmishes happen and tensions develop along the India-China border, but not a matching volume of scholarship, for many reasons, not the least of these is the non-accessibility of archival documents related to this dispute at the Indian National Archives from 1913 onwards.

However this is not to say, the issue is totally bereft of quality academic probes. There have been dedicated studies by many authors of renown, who had the resource to access the same archival documents locked up in the Indian National Archives from its counterparts in London and elsewhere. This chapter will be depending a great deal on the data they collected and interpreted, as well as the insights they provided into the problems, not necessarily to draw the same conclusions they did, but to throw light on issues specific to the theme of this book – the Northeast.

The interest of this study then is in another facet of this border issue – the Yarkand river basin, as also the Aksai Chin, which for all practical purposes were no-man’s lands till as late as the advent of the 20th Century, and the manner in which a no-man’s land transformed into a hotly contested political space.

The Yarkand valley is a relatively narrow strip of flatland wedged between the Karakoram ranges in the Indian border and Kuenlun ranges in China’s western province of Sinkiang (now Xinjiang). To its southwest are the Hindu Kush and Pamir ranges. To its east is the Aksai Chin and further on the Tibetan plateau. As in most or all Asiatic societies, there were no definite linear boundaries that demarcated the region, not until the intervention of Western civilisations. Lord Curzon of Kedleston, Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905, an explorer in his own right, a geographer and geopolitical analyst who once undertook a 1200-miles trek across the Pamirs had noted that ‘the idea of a demarcated Frontier is itself an essential modern conception, and finds little or no place in the ancient world. In Asia, the eldest inhabited continent, there has always been a strong instinctive aversion to the acceptance of fixed boundaries, arising partly from the nomadic habits of the people, partly from the dislike of precise arrangements that is typical of the oriental mind, but more still from the idea that in the vicissitudes of fortune more is to be expected from an unsettled than from a settled Frontier… In Asiatic countries it would be true to say that demarcation has never taken place except under European pressure and by the intervention of European agents.’ In this case the Western civilisation is represented by the British. The British inherited the boundary problem in this sector in 1846 after it added to its expanding Indian Empire the State of Jammu & Kashmir with its conquest of the Sikhs.

Ever since this new acquisition was made, the British were uneasy about Kashmir’s un-demarcated boundaries, and began almost immediately thereafter to put in efforts to fix its northern and eastern boundaries. Two boundary commissions followed one another. The first, consisting of two members, was set up in July 1846 and given the mandate of defining the boundary between the British territories in the districts of Lahul and Spiti in the South and those of Ladhak in the north and also Ladakh’s boundary with Tibet. This effort came to nought as China did not cooperate largely by refusing to respond British entreaties to set up corresponding surveys and finally to conclude a treaty on the matter. The Governor General of India at the time, Henry Hardinge did not however give up on its quest for a defined boundary. He appointed a second Boundary Commission on 10 July 1847, this time of three members. This effort also was in vain as the Chinese still did not respond to request for a joint determination of the boundary from Spiti to Pangong Lake. In May 1848 the government abandoned further attempts to secure an agreed frontier with China.

The British however still did not give up the effort and continued to take keen interest in sizing up the frontier and determining how far its territorial interest should extend on this front. Failure of the two boundary commissions halted the efforts to define the boundary with China, but they did not kill the efforts or alter the course.  From the point of view of this study however, more than how far the British effort was successful or at what consequences, the significant question is why the British came to consider the matter so urgent. North of the Karakoram ranges is the Yarkand valley flanked to its north by the Kuenlun ranges. Why and how did this narrow strip of inhospitable, virtually uninhabited land become so important for the British to make it persist in the effort to draw a definite boundary and not leave it as a no-man’s land as it always was, and which it was for all practical purposes at the time? On numerous occasions, in various official correspondences within the British administration as well as those of the British administration with the Chinese authorities, the land was indeed referred to as no-man’s land. All the while, before the advent of the British interventions after their acquisition of Kashmir, China and indeed none of the smaller principalities and their tributaries in and around the region, Tibet, Kashmir, Ladhak, Hunza and more, were certain, or probably cared much where their exact boundaries were.

Seventeen years after they acquired Kashmir in 1846, the British were still groping in the dark. After many surveys subsequent to the two fruitless boundary commissions, the unresolved debate that emerged in their official circle was whether the Karakoram watershed or that of the Kuenlun should be the boundary of India. If the boundary was to be made purely by the application of the internationally accepted boundary making principle of the main mountain watershed of river systems, then as Karunakar Gupta points out, in ‘the Imperial Gazetteer of Iidia (1908) Chamber`s Gazetteer (1962), Columbia Encyclopaedia (1963), the Swedish explorer- Sven Hedin, Owen Lattimore – all agree that the Karakoram Mountains (and not the Kuenluns) are the main water-divide in this region.’ But the answer to this increasingly desperate concern came to be determined not by any standard principles of cartography, but by the appearance of Russia in the political horizon. The Imperial Russia was at the period expanding and pushing south and absorbing all the small khanates and other principalities in the area. Under the circumstance, the exchanges of opinions within the British administrative circles, on which of these imagined boundaries would be most defensible and suitable is interesting.

Read more / Original news source: http://kanglaonline.com/2014/04/book-extract-rivers-river-valleys-mountains-as-integral-region/

Former Manipur minister dead – The Hindu

Former Manipur minister deadThe HinduMohammad Hellanuddin Khan who represented the Lilong Assembly constituency for more than 20 years died at his residence on Friday night due to stroke. He was 78. He left behind his wife, two sons and three daughters…

Former Manipur minister dead
The Hindu
Mohammad Hellanuddin Khan who represented the Lilong Assembly constituency for more than 20 years died at his residence on Friday night due to stroke. He was 78. He left behind his wife, two sons and three daughters. Family sources said that they were …

Read more / Original news source: http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&ct2=us&usg=AFQjCNG5g2-VJlAgXsOYSEqdhX3hjoWIng&clid=c3a7d30bb8a4878e06b80cf16b898331&ei=KjRfU7jkEMbV8gGGvwE&url=http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/other-states/former-manipur-minister-dead/article5950583.ece