By – Amar Yumnam
Imphal, Sept 30:
No society is an overnight product. Every society is a product of long historical processes of evolution. In this evolutionary process, the individuals, the families, the localities, the groups, the ethnicity/ethnicities, the geography, the polity, the economy and the dynamics of all these and their interplays have to play their constructive roles to evolve into a community. A community constituting a society can be singular or diverse in the core characteristics of larger interactions.
In the evolutionary process over millennia, the smallest groups must have interacted with one another. This interaction must have taken place for a long time to learn from experiences and evolve trust based on long term experiences of interactions. This larger action of interactions must be over centuries such that the groups form a larger one and accept themselves as non-distinctive components of the new larger group.
This larger group must also evolve other social and economic experiences such that it grows and survives. Just taking an example, we know that if there are plenty of rains, there would be flood. If there are floods our endeavours in plantation or even our wild sources of food for survival could be destroyed. This lesson is not something which any group would learn from a single episode but from multiples spread over years. Thus endeavours to ensure sustenance of food availability could be matured, if any, over centuries of experience.
But man does not live by bread alone. Once the staple food has been identified with experiences over centuries, the group must have learnt again with experiences over centuries that there are needs for supplementary foods. The discovery and ultimate identification of the core components of food items must have taken over centuries of within and intra and inter-group sharing of experiences.
In this millennial experience of surviving, the groups must have enriched themselves with the experiences of interacting with more or less similar groups. In this process, they must have learnt a lot of things to do with individual and collective behaviours. In the process of continual interactions with other groups, there must have been many pressures and counter-pressures for alterations in behavioural manifestations. This must have taken over centuries for the different groups to agree on something for non-aggressive continuation of lives.
In this inter-group interactions for centuries, each group must be introspecting continually on whether what interactions to continue and what not to continue. On the basis of this introspection, the groups feeling positive for each other would form a larger group and collectively decide to pursue future endeavours without violating the evolved trusts. This is what we call Social Norms, Social Ethos and now Institutions.
While evolving the social institutions over a period of centuries, the groups must have also been simultaneously learning on the sustainable lessons for ensuring stable continuation of livelihood. This is the evolution of the economic dimension of social life on a stronger footing such that the evolving society does not collapse. This is again an experience which will extend over centuries to be finally agreeable and follow by all. This is how acceptable Economic Norms would emerge; this is called Economic Institutions.
Thus any group would evolve into a society on the bases of mutually agreed upon principles of socio-economic methods of livelihood. It is a prelude to the evolution and formation of a state. This evolution towards a state is possible because all the socio-economic interactions and ultimately the political ones are founded on generally agreed upon principles of morality; this is called Ethnic Morality.
So any state is the outcome of millennial experiences of social life, economic livelihood, and political lessons of interactions founded on mutually accepted norms of human behaviour. Thus Morality is a key component of any society and thus of any state. This is exactly how the Manipur society evolved over the millennia and the Manipur as an independent state was born.
Let me recall here what Thorstein Veblen had said in 1898: “for the purpose of economic science the process of cumulative change that is to be accounted for is the sequence of change in the methods of doing things—the methods of dealing with the material world.”
A society emerges founded on ‘cumulative causes’, and these causes are endogenous; these cumulative causes must have played out for centuries testing the viability and foundational social strength. A society and a state cannot be founded on exogenous causes. Some very disturbing things have happened in the neighbouring country and there does seem to be signs of continuation of these for quite some years. Taking advantage of these, a move has arisen for establishment of another state by carving out from Manipur. This is not right even on the moral ground of social evolution and state establishment.
To conclude, I would emphasise that a state cannot be founded on exogeneous reasons and history is never an overnight product. A state in not a product of violent enforcement.
