By – Amar Yumnam
For more than three years, people have been thinking, articulating and acting as facing an inter-ethnic conflict in Manipur. For me, I have been putting forth the opinion that it is a consequential effect of something else. The causes of killings each other are not only non-internal but the acts are also very much non-Manipur like. The recent writings of Dr. R K Ranjan, former Union Minister of India, look very independent in his environment views, and keep well in a very historically as well as contemporaneously contextual way. There is also still ongoing tragedy of the Nepal disaster. Now comes the United Nations Environment Programme to issue a report for “Limiting Overshoot: Navigating exceedance of 1.5°Cand pathways towards return” as the world is very dangerously at the point of irreversible sink into non-reversible climate change. The 2017 book on Climate Change And Natural Disasters by Vinod Thomas drew invariably the global attention to the i. “Natural disasters, especially climate-related, are becoming increasingly anthropogenic events, with human actions influencing not only exposure and vulnerability, but also the nature of hazards themselves.” ii. Being linked “to anthropogenic factors, there is a pressing need for climate mitigation. As it relates to disasters, such risk reduction measures are highly beneficial economically and socially. Disaster response is vital, but prevention to limit, if not avoid losses, needs to be the first step.” iii. Further, “prevention, including climate mitigation, ought not to be viewed as a cost to economic growth but an investment. In fact, growth cannot be projected to continue without integrating climate impact and actions into the growth scenario.”Here arises the fear expressed in UNEP Report on Limiting Overshoot to be taken seriously. In this the recent two-part article on When the Hills Begin to Change: Climate Crisis Rewrites Life, Farming and Food Security in Kamjong by Addie Chiphang becomes very informative and to act over for when something happens in Kamjong, it can never be an isolated event confined only to an area; let us recall what Elinor Ostrom had said.
As I said in the beginning, the ‘inter-ethnic killings’ are just manifestations of the forces playing games on our people. Here, I would like to mention that the Economics Department of Manipur University is one of the first seven departments in the country incorporating Environmental Economics in the curriculum. I happened to be present in a national meeting discussing the rising relevance of the subject. Immediately on return from the meeting, I took the initiative and introduced the subject. While teaching the subject, it became increasingly clear to me of two things about Manipur. First, the property rights regime in Manipur was still as of now incompletely defined. Second, this kind of a scenario creates a convenient atmosphere of what Hardin (1968) called the Tragedy of the Commons. The first one is an Institutional Weakness (areas of weakness of social norms), and creating a space for, very recently called, Anti-Social Norms” designed to offset the most essential mechanism for social norm enforcement.” The second one (without getting into the big debates aroused), let me confine to what Hardin himself said. He emphasised that “An implicit and almost universal assumption of discussions published in professional and semipopular scientific journals is that the problem under discussion has a technical solution. A technical solution may be defined as one that requires a change only in the techniques of the natural sciences, demanding little or nothing in the way of change in human values or ideas of morality.” The humans should not be thinking that one (including government) can extract anything without bothering for any other. For Manipur I had written at the international level on the potential for conflicts just before the turn of the century and after.
So far only R K Jaichandra talked of resolving this tragedy of the commons potential in an incompletely defined property rights regime, but he could not find enough time and company who understood the issue. The existence of this space gave an opportunity to the ruling party trying to singularise the entire country in all dimensions. Instead of, e. g, linking the traditional skills of the Marings with the financial sector for growth, it found the evolution of a Kuki concept a convenient agency for destroying the civilisational legacy of Manipur. In this geopolitical game, the Kukis thought if the sacred and prayer places of the Meeteis were destroyed and kill them in any opportunity, they would get what they want to; they indulged in whatever anti-social norms possible telling others to mind their own business. They have been wrong in thinking, actions and strategies right from the beginning. Escaping out from the military rule in the neighbouring country, they should have restrained themselves from becoming an agency for Tragedy of the Commons in the destination; an inflicted self-wound.