By – Amar Yumnam
For more than three years, Manipur has been facing crises unfinished; a little improvement in one being replaced by another big one. Before discussing the issues, let us first consider the medium and the players involved:
A. Democracy is defined as the government of the people, by the people and for the people. Experience has just been the opposite – government for the people and party in government and destroying every institution to serve their interests. There is no such thing called democratic governance understood as: “Good governance was from the start associated with liberal institutions and values, including the rule of law, an independent judiciary, checks on executive power, proper accountability, and sometimes pluralism, human rights, and a robust civil society.”
B. While participation and inclusiveness should be the framework, imposition from top, non-tolerance of any dissent and free-riding (“benefit from a collective good, without having incurred the costs of participating in its production”)of a few are the norms at both Central and Local levels;
C. “Measuring government performance and effectively communicating the results are essential components of good governance. Demonstrating results, or a lack thereof, enables citizens, elected officials, and the media to hold government accountable for its performance.” This accountability dimension is zero at all Bureaucratic, Legal, Professional and Political components;
D. There has been Leadership Collapse right from the Local to the Country-level; the concept of multi-level governance is unheard of by the present government;
E. There is drug-trading large in scale and volume unimaginable without the knowledge or potential participation of the people in governance. F. Despite all this, there has been no administrative attempt to link the policy-making with the policy thinkers and thereby deepening the opportunity for free-riding;
F. All these imply the absence of Leadership; it is leadership which causes either success or failure; and G. There is no digestion of how India was born.
To these Centre-State interactional-induced problems, Manipur adds her own:
I. The civil society organisations show strong signs of being sponsored groups including by individuals in the powers that be; the complete responseless nature of government to both responsibility and accountability has provided the sponsors a strong weapon to push for personal interests and leaving little opportunity to the youths for non-participation;
II. In the conflicts going on, it cannot be said that only one side is right or wrong;
III. The exclusivity of ethnic conceptualisation is getting deeper as evident from the claiming of identity as anything other than Manipuri. The recent hat-trick in weight-lifting in the Commonwealth Games was being strongly articulated to be by an individual belonging to a particular ethnicity and not by a Manipuri.
IV. The near complete arrival of the railways has aroused articulations of external exploitation of Manipur’s natural wealth, and not for preparing for a creation of a shared opportunity for development; remember the old social-complaint against the non-coverage.
It is exactly in this context of injuring fluidity that the issue of alteration and exchange of border areas with the neighbouring country by the federal government have come up. It:
A. Reflects the cruelty of governance.
B. Also reflects illiteracy on constructing a border policy. Just being in power does not necessarily imply the capability to frame a new border policy, and particularly so given the way India was born. While framing a policy on border involving a neighbouring country having inherited historical linkages, multiples of issues are to be digested.
I. It is “vital that we have a critical and nuanced understanding of the ways in which the two commonly but often imprecisely used terms, heritage and identity, interact and build upon each other.” As Graham and Howard put: “In a world in which identity is fundamental to politics and contestation at a global scale, understanding the means of articulating often vague feelings and senses of belonging becomes quite crucial. Heritage in its broadest sense is among the most important of those means, even more so because identity can no longer be framed primarily within the national context that has so defined it…”
II. To understand border: “The vagueness of the morphological border may be striking, yet this is not to say that the border actually disappeared. The border is not present, yet it is not absent. Maybe imperceptible to the untrained eye, but vividly present and mentally powerful, there is still a border between the [two countries]. Once one has crossed the border, one does de jure and de facto enter another country. Crossing a border makes one from a human from the interior into a human from the exterior, a foreigner, someone from them over there.”
III. There are issues related to both timber and non-timber wild products. The critical issues need an examination by a committee of experts and put it before the public for enhancing the quality of any decision to be taken.