Ignorant Empirics and Casual Social Federalism: Manipur Tragedy

By – Amar Yumnam
Imphal, September 15:
Manipur has been under an unexpected and unprecedented social crisis for more than two years. The additional uniqueness of this experience lies in the absence of attention of the Federal authorities of the country of which Manipur happens to be a province. The people have been thinking of some positively impactful attention and directions for policy interventions from the highest level, but nothing even close to this has happened except something looking like a casual visit from the top federal authority while visiting the neighbouring provinces. Well thinking over this, we do get immediately reminded of what Richard Bernstein wrote in 1976: “In the final analysis we are not confronted with exclusive choices: either empirical theory or interpretative theory or critical theory. Rather, there is an internal dialectic in the restructuring of social and political theory. When we work through any of these moments, we discover how the others are implicated. An adequate social and political theory must be empirical, interpretative, and critical.”
The moment we talk of the three terms of empirical, interpretive and critical, there is a fundamentality for a shared social and administrative capability to indulge here. While it may not be for the entire population, there should certainly be a key proportion of the social population to engage deeply in these. But the kind of recent political mobilisation in Manipur has been such that the individuals with any capability has been disabled and forced to keep shut.  This is where the significance of the quality and the orientation of the government arise.
The scale of this necessity depends on the size of population and territory and as also the diversity of geography and culture; we all know what is the scenario of India on these characteristics. This is what the condition Manipur has been put in during the last few years. All aware of the fact that the local political ability to attend to the unprecedented crisis has been below par, and it is exactly of this that the Federal Authorities replaced the local governance by the Central Administration.
It is exactly here that two features inter alia come out very clearly. First, it has been looking like a wonderful display of ignorance exercising the power to take social decisions by the federal authorities at the highest level. While the capability of the political at the local level to take critical decisions and undertake the requisite implementation of the policies needed has been put to question, the behavioural manifestation of the highest federal authority has been one where ignorance is the agent for decisions and actions. Second, the charming atmosphere of democracy is the beautiful visibility of individuals engaging in collectives and engaging for personal enhancement of welfare without compromising the shared social enhancement potential. But the case in Manipur has been one where the individuality of the individuals has been suppressed with the greatest likelihood of the loss of life if ventured into something with a firm belief for positive outcomes.
Here I find what Lorenzo Infantino wrote in 2003 in his book titled Ignorance and Liberty: “We can identify an entire world of unplanned institutions, for example, language, law, family, city, market and many others. And yet we cannot forget that society itself is a spontaneous order. In other words, the bond which unites acting individuals has an internal nature; it is produced unintentionally by individuals themselves. As we already know, this has relevant political consequences. … Here, the most important point is something else. There is an ‘objective’ world, the world of spontaneous orders, generated by the aggregation of our actions. It does not reflect our intentions. We often look at it as at a surprisingly obscure universe. Hence, the need to explain it. To this end social sciences were born. They help us to understand how actions aimed at a specific goal also produced (and produce) norms and social institutions. In other words, social sciences shed light on the function that norms and social institutions carry out for our benefit.”
The unfortunate dimension of the Indian polity is that, even after seven decades as a country, the differentials have not yet been appreciated and attempts are yet to be put in place to perform this task for the inherited civilisational potentials to play out. The failures, in other words, are in every branch of framework and foundations for performing the social task for moving ahead in the positive direction, if possible ahead of the competitive countries. We are still in such a situation as put by Anthony H. Birch in 1989 in his Nationalism and National Integration: “Nationalism is the most successful political ideology in human history. In the two centuries since its first formulation in the writings of European philosophers, it has caused the political map of the world to be completely redrawn, with the entire land surface (apart from Antarctica) now divided between nation-states. Nevertheless, nearly all of these states contain ethnic or cultural minorities within their borders that are only imperfectly integrated into the national society. The process, problems and frequent failures of national integration are issues of central importance in the contemporary world.” India still fails to create a kind of federalism to address, cure and evolve a kind of endogeneous and interactional model envious by the world. My personal fear is if there is a political feeling across the power representatives of larger territorial and demographic entities to continue with the political inequalities to take decisions and allow the social tensions to persist in the small ones.