By – Amar Yumnam
Imphal, October 28:
Emotions are something we all feel more often than not. Here I am not talking of the emotions one feels in private matters. I am rather being concentrated on the emotions the administration as a matter of governance makes the people feel. As a common man, I can say that I feel three types of emotions. First, there are events and stories on which I feel emotional for short periods. Second, there are experiences, events and stories on which I feel as longer term emotions and these go underground; they can reappear in memory format in mind occasionally depending upon context. Third, there are emotions which I feel strongly and would feel them permanently just so much that I would feel even jittery sometimes even while crossing the highways if they coincide with the thinking on the events.
It is the third category of public emotions which are heaviest in generating the qualitative as well as the quantitative emotions in me. Of these I would mention of three. Even though I was not yet born at that time, the stories of the process of Merger with India are something which do cause heavy feelings of pain, suppression and imposition of external intentions on the local people of Manipur. This feeling is something like what Daniel Kahneman and his team call Noise in their 2021 book titled Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement: “A defining feature of system noise is that it is unwanted….”. While the book talks of individual manifestations, I am talking of the issue related with the Kingdom of Manipur and the shared public feelings. As it is history which creates the feeling, the Post-Merger souls like us concentrated on the response to this unwanted feeling through competition with the others in the areas of social existence and the efforts for purported social advancement. This rationalization was based on the theoretical and the practical of the prevailing social reality such that “the rationality of cognitions, such as beliefs, in virtue of which we are theorizing beings seeking a true picture of our world and, on the other hand, the rationality of elements, such as actions, in virtue of which we are practical beings seeking to do things, in particular to satisfy our needs and desires.”
But this rationalization of the public feeling has been deeply violated by two instances which reserve a place for themselves whenever I think about Manipur. This is because all what we have learnt on society, nation and political economy have nothing to positively explain these two events. Even further, there is the core violation if the internally accepted civil rule involved in the occurrences under which no attempt for accountability can even be asked by the public from the government; people asking for accountability with some level of social effectiveness can themselves be killed by the forces of the state without any scope for accountability.
The two events I am talking of are: A. The Malom Massacre of 2000, and B. The recent complete conversion of the royalty-related building of Manipur in Shillong (Manipuri Rajbari or the Redlands Building) into dust. The Malom Massacre is a case of the Assam Rifles, a force of the Indian State, to shoot down people waiting for bus in a bus stand in Malom in the Imphal West District of Manipur and causing dead of ten people on the spot. This caused the famous Fasting Unto Death by Sharmila and huge public outcry for establishing accountability. Well, who cares and nothing of the accountability happened or initiated by the government for doing so as it was legal in this part of India under a law applicable only to this part of the country.
While the 2 November 2000 incident of massacring people standing in a bus stand is still fresh in the minds of the people and constitute a non-forgettable component of individual and public memory, something also has happened exactly a quarter of century down the line. Come October 2025 and Manipur does not have a government of democratically elected representatives. A purely temporary government under the Constitution has taken a decision for complete dismantling and acted on it as well without prior information in any form to the people of Manipur; I am talking of the Manipuri Rajbari or the Redland Building. Well forgetting the globally respected norm of taking people into confidence can be taken as unnecessary as even killing without accountability can be practiced and performed in Manipur, the issue here is of the relevance and the accompanying historical significance of the structure. Irrespective of size, the reality of Manipur as a Kingdom with pride and sustaining it cannot be taken light. Manipur’s history as a Kingdom is not something without identity. History sustained and identity defined at the global level are not something to be attempted to destroy. Even further, we have the constitutional question and the globally honoured legal norm of how can a known purely temporary government take decisions to destroy foundations of past history of the society. If it is a case that history of relatively small population living in a small territory can be easily forgotten, we must remember that this amounts to violating the principles of nation-building in a large diverse country. Another unfortunate and undemocratic feature of the action of demolition was based on a decision taken by a government of purely temporary arrangement. Democracy is not something to be practiced as per convenience, and this applies to all within the country.