By – Amar Yumnam
Imphal, Aug 26:
Manipur is in the news and has been so for more than a year. The world now waits for news updates on Manipur. The unfortunate part is that all these relate to negative social happenings. The world now asks if there is anything like governance in Manipur. The feeling of governance is to be felt through the governing actions of the government. In a family, the elders may just be unable to undertake any meaningful action when the children are unruly or there are tensions across the members of the household; the elders may just not bother about these and leave the issues to the vagaries of time. This can lead to the break-up of the family.
But such an approach of leaving the social problems to the swings according to time can never be adopted in the case of the state and more so in a diverse – historically or contemporarily – society. A state should and must necessarily attend to the issues at hand, digest them and direct the efforts of the state towards a sustainable stable solution. This is called governance – a function to be performed by the government in place. The characteristic difference of governing a state from the administration of a family can be appreciated as Kooiman and van Vliet (2000) put: “Governing, comparing with the steering of a ship, means navigating by continuously perceiving the movements of the subsystems, and, dependent on these movements, adjusting the course.” In other words, governing a society is necessarily a multi-dimensional functional performance by the government.
Now the question before us is: What has been the approach, nature and performance on the governance front of the government in place in Manipur? The immediacy and unavoidability of reconsidering this question have arisen due to the social, political and economic costs Manipur has incurred at the collective level during the last nearly two years. As stated above, the last nearly two years Manipur has been facing very acute social crises. If such crises were only of a short duration and confined to a small group in a small place, the matter could have been tackled in the usual way under the law and order interventions. Being a democratic governance under a cabinet system of government, a short run and more or less easily addressable issue can be discussed and resolved by the cabinet. But if the problem becomes such as to involve a large section of the population spread over a large area and also an unprecedented issue, there necessarily arises the necessity for the cabinet to incorporate larger capacity. In such cases, there arises the imperative to move beyond urgent interventions to endeavours to digest the new manifestations and evolve policies instead of depending upon routine actions.
When it comes to policies to address unprecedented issues, the government must think of how to go about. The cabinet does not have time and usually lack the capability to evolve policies on new issues. Here I would like to recall what Turke (2008) identified as “fundamental capacities” of a social structure: A. Change or Transformation Capacity; B. Channel Capacity; and C. Transduction Capacity. The first capacity takes care of these: “What aspects of an issue can be addressed? Do the methods applied in interaction express requisite variety? Change or transformation capacity refers to “How issues are brought to a solution and practical doing?”, i.e., the practices, methods and instruments to execute changes.” The Channel capacity refers to “the ability to convey the change to be induced between actors, i.e. to express the proportion of relevant distinctions that can be made accessible to actors in due time to allow them to recognise the relevant states and changes to perform. Who is involved and what can each contribute? Thus, channel capacity refers to “Who relates to whom and when”, i.e. the relationships, tasks, responsibilities, and processes defined which actors’ capacity to effectively conduct joint ‘system’ implementations.” The third one, Transduction Capacity is “the ability to translate changes according to recipients’ background and rationality, i.e. the proportion of relevant distinctions that can be put across between actors. What aspects of a statement can be made compatible, understandable? Thus, transduction capacity refers to “How mutual understanding is created?”, i.e. the languages, conventions established.”
These are issues which only an Experts Committee can adequately initiate the debate, identify the relevant issues and put forth the areas for policy intervention. The first major issue is the one on Ethnicity. The Government should have established an Experts Committee to evolve a long-term policy on ethnicity. Further, the displacements have certainly created generational issues particularly the large-scale failures on the social sector, particularly education. This calls for fast understanding of the issues and put the required interventions in time. Still further, the homelessness has now evolved into a big social crisis, the multidimensionality of which need to be appropriately appreciated.
Given all these, the Manipur government should have put three powerful committee of experts in place more than a year back to ensure that the long term transformation continues unabated. Instead, the development trajectory of Manipur, as of today and other things remaining the same, has been put at jeopardy for the next three decades. The worsening of inequality scenario and the deepening of survival risks are not jokes in today’s Manipur. Manipur needs attention to Social Policy more than ever.
