By – Amar Yumnam
Imphal, July 28:
Manipur is passing through a stage of destruction – educationally, mentally, intellectually, physically, demographically and even socially at the wider level. It is a kind of destruction where one cannot share the information at the individual levels and personalized groups, and a significant faction of the society – intellectuals – is made to feel scared to express anything. It is a kind of scenario where any society can only disappear sooner than later. It is a kind of society where suppression would be norm and agency indulging in elimination of anyone with a different voice would be the functioning strategy.
This destruction in Manipur is happening in a very peculiar way under a Political System named Democracy. Further this democracy claims to follow the system of Democratic Federalism. Still further, this is happening in an originally independent kingdom and with an expectation for moving ahead in a larger framework. Even more, diversion of attention from the key issues would be a routine exercise by the administration, and the voice of the intellectuals would command the price of life. In a latest example, conveying an underlying intention would be the non-caring even for condolence when a personality of international repute (who had brought respectability to the country) leaves this world for the heavenly abode; by the way, this person happened to express independent opinions instead of subservience to the powers that be at the federal level.
The destruction happening in Manipur is a very different from the ones we happen to hear as a serious philosophical thought propounded by Jacques Derrida – Deconstruction. As an intellectual Derrida put about himself thus: “‘It’s true you will always find me making this gesture, I have no final justification for it, save that it’s who I am, or where I am. I am at war with myself, it’s true, you have no idea how much, beyond anything you may guess, and I say contradictory things, which are, shall we say, in real tension with one another, and which make me what I am, are my life’s blood, and will be the death of me.
Sometimes I see it as a terrifying and painful war, but at the same time I know that’s what life is. I will find peace only in eternal rest. So I cannot say I have come to terms with the contradiction, though I also know it is what keeps me alive, and indeed makes me ask the very question you were recalling: “How to learn, how to teach how to live?” For Derrida, Deconstruction itself is a Construction process where consciousness is present. All these will have to happen in a contextualized way.
But the destruction occurring in Manipur today is very non-contextual. While even the intellectuals are made almost like non-existent in the society, it would be only absence of both mind and consciousness to expect any kind of the Derrida style of deconstruction to take place with the common people in the centre of play. The social process that Derrida expected under Deconstruction cannot even happen: “The primordial Difference of the absolute Origin, which can and indefinitely must retain and announce its pure concrete form with a priori security: i.e., the beyond or the this-side which gives sense to all empirical genius and all factual profusion, that is perhaps what has always been said under the concept of ‘transcendental’, through the enigmatic history of its displacements. Difference would be transcendental. The pure and interminable disquietude of thought striving to ‘reduce’ Difference by going beyond factual infinity toward the infinity of its sense and value, i.e. while maintaining Difference – that would be transcendental. And Thought’s pure certainty would be transcendental, since it can look forward to the already announced Telos only by advancing on the Origin that indefinitely reserves itself. Such a certainty never had to learn that Thought would always be to come.”
It is exactly in such circumstances that the unavoidable role of the political leadership arises in the search for reason for survival of the society with historical strengths adapted to the contemporary context, endeavouring for clarity of the reason and restore the atmosphere of critical debate in the society. The present political leadership in Manipur has utterly failed to play this role. They have failed to make the people feel that a vision for the land, people and society is being articulated such that the evolutionary process of the society is sustained. The statements made by this leadership is very much like this: “If indication is not added to expression, which is not added to sense, we can nevertheless speak in regard to them of a primordial ‘supplement’: their addition comes to make up for a deficiency, it comes to compensate for a primordial nonself-presence.”
The tragedy of Manipur is that the political leadership at the Federal level does not care either. The regional issues are not to be tried to digest. The dynamics of federal issues are to be sidelined. The killings, the conflicts, the political-economic declines, the social upheavals and what not are to be left or deepened such that the historical legacies can be forgotten.
In these circumstances, what Manipur inescapably needs is the social endeavouring to Reconstruct a Thinking Political Leadership who would create a Vision for the region and apply mind to evolve a socially healthy dynamic to interact with the Federal system with pride and prosperity. As Derrida’s son Pierre recalls as told by the father before dead: “Always prefer life and never cease affirming survival.” Manipur too prefers life.