By – Amar Yumnam
Imphal, March 19:
It is the time of democracy wherein the public in a nation exercise their personal choice to represent him/her in administration and the party which wins the highest number of representatives will be considered as the collective choice of the people to rule the country for the period specified in the constitution. It is exactly at this period marked by post-modernist social characteristics that I cannot help one memory from a book keeps recalling. We all are more or less aware of what Plato had said long back that a few selected philosophers should run the administration of a country. Let us try to recall as to why Plato put this argument. He felt that not all people would know what is good for the people, and thus the few philosophers possessing that knowledge should be provided with all the powers of the state. This is exactly what Aristotle meant when he emphasised “tools to those who can use them.”
These constant recalling of what the Greats said has been caused by what has been happening in Manipur during the last two years and thereby almost displaying in sharp terms if the governance has been in the hands of those who know little if any of what is good for the people as the tools have fallen into the hands of those with little knowledge of utilising them if any. This way Manipur has been under governance fiasco for two continuous years now.
Manipur is a land of small geographic size inhabited by a small population while speaking at the provincial level. Even if we look as a constituent of India, the smallness becomes even more so. Though small in size, she is a place of diverse ethnic population following different property rights regimes. In one, the modern individual property rights regime is fully established. In another, there is a community ownership system. In these two there is an emphasis on the supremacy of the Collective Choice and thereby making them strongly align with the modern system of democracy. In another third one, there is still the old system of the village king being the owner of the village land. The collective choice mechanism has been trying to evolve in this community group and thus strengthen the democratic orientation, but the authoritative regime still prevails.
The governance of Manipur can be performed by necessarily digesting this divergence and the socially or otherwise behavioural orientation of the various groups. The ethnic group with private ownership institution and the one with the more or less authoritative system have been at loggerheads for nearly two years now with deaths and dislocations of common population. This happening has very nearly reached two years and ipso facto it definitely is a governance fiasco. The ‘government’ at both the provincial and the federal levels has very successfully allowed the emergence of an atmosphere of non-governable.
This is exactly here the issue of Trust arises. As Thomas Buford (2009) puts very clearly: “On the one hand humans have a physical nature. Born into the world, they have a natural endowment. As newborns they are little more than bodies that though small at the beginning can grow tall, heavier. Their heartbeat, blood, veins, bones, sinews, synapses, and other natural endowments have been and will continue to be shaped by a DNA structure and their natural environment. That is their natural existence. In addition, they have another “nature.” Interacting with their various environments, humans slowly take on a social existence. The shaping is so deep that it appears to be innate, but is not. It is their second nature. They learn to use a particular language, to eat in ways similar to those around them, use utensils available to them. Though it is learned individually, the core of the shape is shared by other members of society and constitutes their culture.” I am bringing up this second nature of humans because the interrelations across individuals and ethnicities are founded on this. Let us recall the 1960 book of Korhauser on The Politics of Mass Society. Every modern society are integrated and made functionally successful by a wide number of varied social groups and organisations; there are so many formal and informal relationships happening among them. All these are possible and the peaceful dynamics including politicking are happening for there is a shared belief that none would try to destroy any other.
The government has to perform inter alia two functions inevitably here. First, the prevailing functioning formal and informal social relationships are mobilised for further social transformation. Second, the government itself should prove to the society the shared benefits of social progress based on the trusted relationship between government and the citizens. Instead the people rather discuss in widespread muted language the absence of any quality of sincerity on the part of the government.
In Manipur, the shared trust based on formal and informal organisations has been mostly damaged between two ethnic groups and would definitely take long to recover. Second, the citizens do not trust both the Central and the Provincial governments that they would do good for the people sincerely. So at one go trust among the people and trust between the government and the citizens have been highly damaged. How can such a situation arise with the so-called machinery of intelligence of the state and a security force claiming capability to face any force challenging India?
