Failure to become Great from Goodness: Manipur Case

By – Amar Yumnam
For the last three years in particular, we have been discussing and debating but now these are increasingly silenced by the agencies of the state coupled by some political players any open continuation of the discourses of social crises in Manipur today. We have innumerably discussed the weaknesses – probably intentional – of governance to attend to these. Time and accumulated experience tell us that we should rather be looking at ourselves on evolving to a higher social order. Every society faces challenges of transformation from time to time. In fact, transformation from the inherited qualities to comparatively more contemporary and multiplication of the quantitative products consequent upon interactions among the qualitative properties is what every society should endeavour to achieve. In other words, what every society should aim for is to move from Good To Great –a term from a book by Jim Collins (2001) by the same name. In this highly acclaimed book, Collins was writing about companies, but I could not resist the relevance of the perspective while thinking about my home State. He wrote inter alia: “The good-to-great companies were not, by and large, in great industries, and some were in terrible industries. In no case do we have a company that just happened to be sitting on the nose cone of a rocket when it took off. Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice.” Let us replace the term companies by societies, and look at Manipur. Given the character and performance of governance, we shall have to search out the transitory path of Manipur from the societal angle.
We all have heard, seen and experienced the diversity of the human components constituting the society of Manipur. Right from childhood, we all know that no celebration of Lai Haraoba (Celebration of Ruling Deities at village levels) in the valley is complete without the presence of, now symbolic, of the demographic representative from the mountains of Manipur. This necessarily implies that Manipur had already incorporated in the old social functioning the present emphasis on geography as a development component. Further, the imperative of collaboration to incorporate the diversity in the cultural constituents of demographic diversity was also accepted long back. These two qualities ensure the Goodness of the society. We all know from the global experience that no society can remain static, it must necessarily be engaged in a shared endeavour to evolve into higher ones. These are what we call the relevance and role of heritage in the development trajectory of any society. Here we need to appreciate how should we understand by heritage as put forth by David Harvey (2008): “Indeed…even the frequently cited notion that heritage is somehow inexorably connected to ‘modernity’ is problematical. Heritage itself is not a thing and does exist by itself – nor does it imply a movement or a project. Rather, heritage is about the process by which people use the past – a ‘discursive construction’ with material consequences. As a human condition therefore, it is omnipresent, interwoven within the power dynamics of any society and intimately bound up with identity construction at both communal and personal levels.” This is where Manipur has gone wrong – the ‘discursive construction’ has not happened but the dynamics pushed by the “official powers” have taken the legacy in a direction away from the natural and needed for development.
The contemporary global competition is in terms of the linking up the technology with the inherited heritage with no time to be wasted to playing negative political games – both induced and internal mistakes. Rebuilding the traditional heritage in lines tuning with the modern global competitions for shared well-being is the only route to be followed. The recognition and appreciation of differential capabilities of the inherited legacy by ourselves can be the only way to carry our society forward; I intentionally use this ‘differential’ term for increasingly the Northeast is a left-out by both federal government and the intellectuals discussing the national (for me I now use the South East Asia region of India as the more appropriate term to necessarily imply the social differentials) issues. Instead of blaming and fighting between the demographic components with geographic differentials, the imperative is to identify the focus areas for development. Here, we must emphasise identification of the key components needing urgent attention; the ‘identity’ conflict will not take us anywhere. This should be necessarily accompanied by a shared commitment on the mid-term and the long-term visions for strengthening the society. It is this shared commitment on a development vision which can take us forward, and compel the ‘official agencies’ to perform instead of playing political games. We should agree upon which constituent shares more in evolving the development dynamics such that over a time we present the world a model of from conflict to development.