By – Amar Yumnam
Imphal, April 28:
The people of Manipur are really sad and very unhappy with the death caused to humanity recently in Jammu and Kashmir. Simultaneously they are also feeling very sad strongly and widely at that of another feeling. While the difference in the group of people experiencing death killed in the Jammu and Kashmir is being fully understood, another feeling is being felt if the response should be dissimilar. In one unfortunate event and coupled by another lasting for two years have been treated in different ways. Differences among people of different places are to be understood. But this understanding immediately demands that the interventions for addressing the varied social issues of the differing places and people have necessarily to be different. But these different interventions have to be inevitably differential. The problems of one group of people in one place will necessarily be qualitatively different despite the seeming similarities of another place; this is where the need for differential treatment arises.
In the Jammu and Kashmir, the killings happened very recently and within limited hours, while the killings and other absolute disturbances have been happening for two years in the case of Manipur. I immediately recall what Alastair Hannay (2005) said: “The point of saying ‘in public’ in a political context…is not to indicate the truism in each state that has a public there is only one. The distinction is a theoretical or organizational one, within a state, that distinguishes one political category from others. In this perspective it is not hard to speak of the public as some quasi-tangible thing, for instance as that body to which political and public life is responsible.” It would be right here what Jean Blondel had said in 1987 in Political Leadership: “[Leadership] To a very large extent, the problem has to do with the changing role of political leadership. The classical theorists were unenthusiastic about leadership on the whole because they felt that most rulers acted improperly and encroached unduly on the affairs of citizens, though it tended to be recognized that leaders were often essential at the moment of setting-up of a polity. Gradually, however, this view began to change. On the one hand, it became increasingly realized that leaders might have a crucial part to play when a major crisis affected society….. But it also became more widely recognized that leaders were essential not during crises, but at all times, in order to help ‘development’ and to preside over the progress of society …when the activities of the state increased and indeed dominated social and economic life ….”
This is exactly where many critical questions arise relating to about what used to be called the Political Economic Issues but now generally discussed as Social Issues with Moral Components as necessary contents; though the concern started by about the mid-1980s, the Morality Aspects are necessarily to be the Core Guiding Principle of social policy formulation. The earlier tradition of treating the various policies of the society as having separate and non-related separations is no longer the norm today.
As Peter Drucker emphasized in 1987 in Bourbon for Breakfast: Living Outside the Statist Quo relating a story: “Some years ago, the head of the local bureaucracy in charge of the distribution of water was quoted in the newspaper along these lines: “If these conditions persist, rationing will certainly become necessary.” If these conditions persist? That’s quite the assumption. We could say during the next rainfall: “If these conditions persist, it will become necessary for everyone to build an ark.” Conditions never persist. They change. Bureaucrats really hate that.”
There are Seven points to be heavily emphasised today in the context of India. First, the time is getting increasingly late very fast for the Indian administration to understand the diversity in both mind and policy action. India is necessarily a diverse country in both Geography and Demography. This necessarily should be recognized and get reflected in policy-formulation without awaiting time. Second, the Institutional Perspectives and practices are different across Geography and Demography; the diversity in different institutional qualities in India is rich. Third, the Differential Development requirements should now be recognized and appropriate policy actions undertaken taking into account the qualitative differentials. Fourth, the Conventional Highness of the Indian Bureaucracy as absolutely knowledgeable about any place and people of India is no longer appropriate. Fifth, policies for enhancing the globally appreciated diversified cultural aspects of India should be evolved in diversified ways. Sixth, India should no longer be seen as something could be seen from a single eye. The beauty of the country is the richness in institutional variety. Seventh, any social crisis should not be seen as something very easy to understand by anyone from another corner of India. The familiarity and the diversity are to be explored under a contextual policy framework, but not pretend that any bureaucrat is fully knowledgeable. Social Knowledge is not to be taken as easy to play with any more.
