An Eye For An Eye: No Solution For Manipur

By – Amar Yumnam
Imphal, December 15:
The charm of a society lies in sustaining the historical values of sharing and coexistence and their enhancement in tune with the global evolution of political values and technological competitions. But it is natural that many societies consist of different ethnicities. In the process of evolution of a shared society, it has been very common that the speed of developmental evolution across the ethnicities can turn out to be differential and increasingly at that. As Steven Smith puts in his book Equality and Diversity (2011) there are two issues of critical importance here: “first, that the values worth promoting across communities, including those associated with equality and diversity, are often conflicting and incommensurable – so are values that pull in opposite directions and cannot be measured against one scale, or, most strongly, cannot be compared; and second, that individuals in these communities are agents who have lives that reflect commitments to many incommensurable ‘valued objects’ both between individuals and group members and across one individual’s life. My main argument is that this type of value conflict and incommensurability is philosophically defensible and, with some elaboration, helps make plausible the normative claims associated with the political slogan that ‘differences should be celebrated’.”
The beauty of Manipur lies in the long historical coexistence of diverse communities with differential ethnic characteristics under the umbrella of a single kingdom and with mutual respects. The prevalence of resources for modern development having been low, the evolution towards inter-ethnic equality in both quantitative and qualitative dimensions has been slow, if not absent. The picture after merger with India 1949 could have been different but has not happened; this differentiation has been getting deeper and wider instead of towards equality.
We may recall here the team of the World Bank studying the infrastructural deficit of Manipur in the beginning of this century for four years; the Team was led by an Engineer from England, Randall Riding, and other four Members with me as the only Indian as Social Impact Specialist. In the various Reports, we had emphasised the necessity of attending to the Social Infrastructure dimensions as well besides the Physical Ones. As a part of the study, I had the opportunity to visit almost all the parts of Manipur including places with no roads and no schools. The other Experts too visited the interior places to identify the interventions needed from their perspective. These visits definitely enabled us to witness the development gap and inter-ethnic social differentials requiring investment interventions sooner. Now we do not know what has happened to the Report; the Government of India has been in complete silence on this.
Given the stage and level of development of Manipur, the role of the state (in the sense of the government) for overall development and push for equalisation of development across the space and the demography needs no re-emphasising. Instead, the there is no functioning highway today. It is as if the government is functioning in a way for the poor to subsidize the powerful a le Julia Cage, the French economist.
It is exactly in such contexts that the public should come together as a people and also try to end the games of the government to keep all in confusion for maximising the benefits of the powerful. In the social media, we see comments and quite a few in socially unwanted languages. Global experiences over the centuries tell us that an eye for an eye is never a solution in any society, particularly a diverse one howsoever it could have been rich in the past. While the government should invariably commit to restore and create the social developmental needs, the people should be engaged in shared endeavours to the revival of the shared social strength. Let me conclude with Vivien Lowndes and Lawrence Pratchett (2008: “Insofar as social capital has always existed, public policies have always benefited to some extent from its advantages. Similarly, policies have inevitably been checked or impeded by social capital in other areas. Today the deliberate turn to social capital places not only a new emphasis upon its value and consequences for policy, but also creates new responsibilities for policy makers. Public policy increasingly seeks to create social capital where it does not exist, or where it is only partial. Moreover, this needs to be of the right type: not only bridging or linking social capital but also bonding social capital where it is in short supply. Redistribution is also important, in order to ensure that the benefits of social capital are widely available. However, policy should not rule out deliberate strategies to liquidate, or at least dilute, the negative effects of bonding social capital. This agenda for policy makers is not an easy one but the prize is surely worth the effort.”