By – Amar Yumnam
A long-time good friend of mine recently sent a joke in the routine morning WhatsApp wishes. It read: “Can anyone recommend a good bank account? Mine ran out of money!” I responded: “If you happen to find one, kindly share the information.” We both exchanged laughter. What I had in my mind while responding to him, I had Manipur in my mind for the province is now “rich” in two features. First, as emphasized repeatedly in my columns, it is as if the governance does not have mind to apply to the critical social issues being encountered there for the last three years; diversion of attention is THE CHIEF endeavour of the government. Second, the people also are marked, in a very non-traditional way, of small groups trying to superimpose their views within each sub-group and make it look like the only social construct within their group. This has the potential to completely destroy the social Manipur in the longer run.
These thoughts immediately reminded me of what Thomas Paine wrote in 1776 in his classic Common Sense: “Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.”
These thoughts naturally led me to the re-realisation of the diversity of the sub-components of the larger society and the imperative to strengthen the inherited social construct of Manipur. Here the emphasis for appreciating the diversity in the institutions (social norms in the sense of the Institutional Economists) and the geography (in the sense of the Economists of Economic Geography) were emphasised more than once in the Reports prepared under the World Bank sponsored studies for Infrastructure in the beginning of this century as well; I was the only Expert Member from India in this International Team. When it comes to development policy, the multidimensionality of development and the interrelatedness of various aspects are now fully appreciated in policy evolutions.
Given the evolving development perspective, poverty of governance and the comparative capability (or rather lack of it) of the government necessarily implied that differentials in levels of development across sub-components of the larger society necessarily arose. In a very unfortunate way, the few who could capitalise on the differential development turned behaviourally very self-centralised rather than believers in social construction of a shared development trajectory. The larger society is now paying the price of deepening and widening of this attitude.
Unfortunately, governance at the provincial level is non-digestive of this process and the Federal Government is busy with blaming the past authorities. Here let us recall Thomas Paine of 1776 in his classic Common Sense: “Some writers have so confounded society with government, as to leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by our wants, and government by wickedness; the former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.” Taking this as the principle, we have to accept that development speeds and levels generally have a tendency to become unequal. Certain development realities need to be analysed and evolve a policy within sub-groups on the basis of this understanding. In this connection, James Bryce wrote in 1905 in his classic Constitution is of particular relevance in today’s Manipur: “”Of the many analogies that have been remarked between Law in the Physical and Law in the Moral World, none is more familiar than that derived from the Newtonian astronomy, which shows us two forces always operative in our solar system. One force draws the planets towards the sun as the centre of the system, the other disposes them to fly off from it into space. So in politics, we may call the tendency which draws men or groups of men together into one organized community and keeps them there a Centripetal force, and that which makes men, or groups, break away and disperse, a Centrifugal. A political Constitution or frame of government, as the complex totality of laws embodying the principles and rules whereby the community is organized, governed, and held together, is exposed to the action of both these forces. The centripetal force strengthens it, by inducing men (or groups of men) to maintain, and even to tighten, the bonds by which the members of the community are gathered into one organized body. The centrifugal assails it, by dragging men (or groups) apart, so that the bonds of connexion are strained, and possibly at last loosened or broken. …Accordingly the history of every community and every constitution may be regarded as a struggle between the action of these two forces, that which draws together and that which pushes apart, that which unites and that which dissevers.” In a diverse society, the capability and the greater responsibility to play the centripetal role lies with the more developed sub-group.