Dengue In Manipur: Public Suffering And Privatised Governance

By – Amar Yumnam
Imphal, October 7:
One very interesting and depicting how a country can get a very transformed achievement within a decade I have just read is an article in the September-October 2025 issue of Foreign Affairs titled as “The Real China Model: Beijing’s Enduring Formula for Wealth and Power” written by two scholars Dan Wang of Stanford University and Arthur Kroeber, Founder of Gavekal Dragonomics. In one sentence, the meaning of the piece and revelation of Chinese strategy, as they have put it, is: “China’s industrial and technological strength is now a permanent feature of the world economy.”
It is exactly at this moment that many new information on the sufferings of Manipur increased my stock for understanding Manipur and the direction it is taking; I can claim with utter arrogance here that I am not one uneducated and uninformed about the issues of Manipur. Mind you, I am not going to talk of the unending display of absence of governance of the social crisis of the last three years. What I shall be talking of today is of a much more serious social implications on the negative side.
While we were growing up in Manipur, the 1960s and the 1970s in particular as the late 1950s I was under the personalised care of my parents and elders, we could witness the gatherings of the local population for cleaning up the dirt from the locality and without in any way demanding money from any family in the locality. While we talk of the locality, we would certainly mean the entire village in an inclusive sense and without exception of any household or small spatial gatherings of families as excluded ones.
In another case, whenever any person – young ones doing well in school and college examinations as an example – doing well in an activity, we all would take it as a collective credit for the entire village, and parents of each household would endeavour their children to emulate the success of the youth from the village or even neighbouring villages.
In another example of cases of difficulties, the families of the villages or neighbouring villages would treat is as personal ones the illnesses of families with poor capability to bear the likely expenses of treatment, and collective sharing by the persons with richer capabilities would be treated as normal behaviour. In still another example, it was a very normal and routine experience of persons and families with higher enrichment to share – even though not a regular one – family needs of poor families for livelihood and survival.
Now what all these mean? These mean Manipur had a strong sense of ancestrally inherited sense of public and this served as the framework for the richness of culture with historical aplenty. It is this richness which has been a main factor for the attraction and widespread appreciation of Manipur by the place and the people from outside. But this presence of a robust sense of belonging to the functioning sense of public is being increasingly murdered. As I had mentioned above, I am not talking here of the social crisis of the last three years in which there has been no evidence of serious application of mind and functioning from the administrative (state as conceptually understood and realised by the people worldwide) end. Here I am definitely talking of the deadly disease, Dengue, which has been attacking Manipur for the last nearly a year or so. Now the present widespread prevalence of Dengue in Manipur and the manner of response by the persons in the government raise some very critical issues about the nature of the state: A. Is Dengue purely a personal problem of the patient? B. Taking care of the patient purely a responsibility of the family to which the patient belongs? C. Is Dengue a non-spreadable illness and nothing will happen to others if someone falls sick? D. Is Dengue a kind of illness in which the personnel of the medical wing of the administration should attend to the needs of the family of the patient only and the rest of the people of the surrounding locality should be treated as non-important in addressing to eliminate the potential of further spread? E. While sidelining the people and families of the surrounding locality and looking after their needs to rule out the likelihood of more patients, should there be some unaccounted financial and personal monetary involvement for the families of the patients or others being visited by medical personnel of the state?
The questions I am raising are the resultant outcome of the method the administration adopts to take care when something like Dengue happens in the province. One very unfortunate meaning of this is: The personnel in the administration of Manipur do not have the concept of public while performing duties. It has no knowledge of how to function when an issue relating to the public occurs or rather it feels that the needs of perceiving anything in terms of the public in totality as conveniently avoidable. This is happening at a time when the general population – particularly those who can express opinions and participate in social debates – have been put in a compulsive atmosphere to avoid opinions. We must not forget that the significance of keeping the public in mind and going along with them has been emphasised right from the beginning of the counting of dates and months. The prolific Greek writer, Plutarch, said in the beginning of the First Century while referring to a funeral oration of Mark Antony: “… perceiving the people to be infinitely affected with what he had said, he began to mingle with his praises language of commiseration, and horror at what happened, he took the under-clothes of the dead, and held them up, showing them strains of blood and the holes of the many stabs, calling those that had done this act villains and murderers.” Ultimately the public will reflect on history and experiences; the present exploitation of the sufferings of the people for personal benefits will be reflected in history. Manners and mannerisms of the people in the administration would come out in history one day or the other.