By – Amar Yumnam
Anyone having any relationship with Economics would get his/her face brightened whenever Milton Friedman is mentioned. Presenting his Permanent Income Hypothesis, he said: “One of the great mistakes is to judge policies and programmes by their intentions rather than their results”. But what I intend to put in this piece is the increasing revelation of the intentions and the programmes failing to yield results. The current happenings of Manipur throw up a unique type of state very different from the Aristotelian criticism of Plato and ideas of Hobbes, Locke, Habermas, Fukuyama and many more would debate about.
The overriding objective of the present party in power in India is the elimination of diversity and reduce the whole into a unitary explanation. They forgot completely what Locke said in 1690 in his Second Treatise of Government: “[T]hings not always changing equally, and private interest often keeping up customs and privileges, when the reasons of them are ceased, it often comes to pass, that in governments, where part of the legislative consists of representatives chosen by the people, that in tract of time this representation becomes very unequal and disproportionate to the reasons it was at first established upon. To what gross absurdities the following of custom, when reason has left it, may lead, we may be satisfied, when we see the bare name of a town, of which there remains not so much as the ruins, where scarce so much housing as a sheepcote, or more inhabitants than a shepherd is to be found, sends as many representatives to the grand assembly of law-makers, as a whole county numerous in people, and powerful in riches.” This talk of absence of legitimisation is like reading of Manipur where India’s reasons fall short of effectiveness. Aristotle put in The Politics (350 BC): “Observation tells us that every state is an association, and that every association is formed with a view to some good purpose. I say good because in all their actions all men do in fact aim at what they think good.”It implies that Trust, not Authoritarian, should be the foundation of the formation and functioning of the government such that it purely reflects the choice of the public.
In a recent column, I had argued that, while geopolitics should be between or among nations, India is playing it in Manipur. As I have said: I. What is happening is not ethnic conflict, but geopolitics by using a third agent; II. The recent refusal for a cultural display in Delhi was geopolitics; and III. The recent attack on the Myanmar security forces while the leader of their country was in India is also geopolitics to adversely affect Manipur. These are based on some critical assumptions relating to raising the volume and scale of risk and uncertainty: A. Destroying a tiny territorial space and external imposition of something could be easy –Trumpian logic; and B. Social, cultural and material destruction of a mini population size cannot be difficult.
The various actions over years to realise these intentions have not yielded the results. The formation of a Demographic Committee without the natural experts is also a kind of public distraction to work out further strategies. Further, simultaneity with the Census and non-controlling the free play with the guns are meaningful. The moral responsibility of the state, as Reus-Smit puts, relating to moral purpose, principle of sovereignty, norm of procedural justice, augmentation of individual purposes and potentialities, liberal sovereignty and legislative justice have all been done away in the case of Manipur by the Pretentious Democracy and Pretentious Federalism.
But why such an unseen buoyant resistance to fulfilling the intentions? It should be realised that geopolitics is not new to the blood of the Manipur society. Historically there is something social in all the functioning and survival of Manipur. First, the counter response to the current geopolitics is still social. Second, the poppy problem has twin objectives of mass damages by drugs and the devastation of the centuries-old robust relationship of the people to nature and nature to people; an easily digested idea. Third, while in other places, there would have been hunger and death; it is the social which prevented this from happening. Spooner’s 1852 proposal was to Abolish the Government. This has been covertly achieved at the local level but the Federal Authority is exercising governance in a very negative way. The headache to them is the robustness of the social dimension of Manipur society. It would not be easy to eradicate the social from Manipur society, even if enforced Local Government Failure is coupled by Eradication Strategy by the Federal Authority. Manipur situation is already talked about in international seminars.
