By – Amar Yumnam
Imphal, Feb 11:
We started our college days immediately after matriculation for the intermediate courses were mostly in the colleges except the few higher secondary schools in existence then. When I started my college days after matriculating in 1971, the most talked about book among Teachers and the intelligentsia was the A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. We used to mention about the title and name of the author among some of the Honours students in the college (the Imphal College was my college) pretending to be learned and informed students. Otherwise, we did not read the book nor did we purchase, but by the beginning of the 1980s it became imperative that we read and digest the articulations of Rawls as Welfare Economics became increasingly incorporated in articulations for development and formulation of development policies; though Pigou has been there for long but without Rawls it is no longer possible to fully perceive welfare. This book of Rawls dominated the debates in the academic world of the social scientists for more than a decade until about the beginning of the 1990s – the articles in journals, conference papers and social science books published during the period generally had a thorough and critical reference to the contribution of contained in it. While the assumption of critical understanding of the Rawlsian ideas is still emphasised, the solitary dominance of this in my area of interest in development studies began to be strongly impacted, widened and deepened by the contributions of Paul Krugman and Douglas North on Economic Geography (whether mountains or plains or both in Manipur context for instance) and Institutional Economics (the contextual social norms – the Meeteis and the Nagas follow different social norms for instance) in the 1980s and the 1990s.
The imperatives for applying the principles of Rawlsian justice in the endeavours for development also became increasingly appreciated in this widening of developmental articulations.
While recalling the original enthusiasms and arousals I felt – academically, contextually and personally – during the first readings of the small but perennially significant book of Rawls, I just saw the 25th Anniversary edition of The Tipping Point of Malcolm Gladwell – the book that marked the turn to the 21st century from the 20th – at the bookshop at the Rajiv Gandhi Airport in Hyderabad awaiting the boarding announcement on 5 February 2025; seeing this book only deepened the refuelling of Rawlsian ideas. Of the four recently published books I had purchased on that day, The Identity Project: The Unmaking Of A Democracy by Rahul Bhatia happens to be one. Before I refer to the contents of this book, let me see what Gladwell had written in The Tipping Point: “the biography of an idea, and the idea is very simple. It is that the best way to understand the emergence of fashion trends, the ebb and flow of crime waves, or, for that matter, the transformation of unknown books into bestsellers, or the rise of teenage smoking, or the phenomena of word of mouth, or any number of the other mysterious changes that mark everyday life is to think of them as epidemics. Ideas and products and messages and behaviours spread just like viruses do.” The adoption of epidemic as the simile may not be comfortable to some, but it does powerfully serve the purpose of application to the dynamics of social processes in a context like India’s. Here arises the significance of what Rahul Bhatia has written in The Identity Project (2024): “Besides sending its foot soldiers into the streets and overseeing violent campaigns, the RSS worked in other ways to cultivate Hindu minds. Their approach was to discredit sources of authority by tainting them as immoral, and creating an atmosphere of suspicion through the publication and repetition of rumours and suggestions.” As Daniel Judah Elazar writes in Exploring Federalism (1991): Federalism is an “an idea that defines political justice, shapes political behaviour, and directs humans toward an appropriately civic synthesis of the two. Through its covenantal foundations, federalism is an idea whose importance is akin to natural law in defining justice and to natural right in delineating the origins and proper constitution of political society.” Now the very federalism foundation and necessity in a diverse – culturally, demographically and geographically – country (which India is) are being attempted for suppression of all under a ONENESS IN EVERYTHING project.
Now there is a big threat to the “consensual basis of the polity” and the significance attached to “the importance of liberty in the constitution and maintenance of democratic republics.” Thus the acceptance and recognition of diversity and the imperatives for emphasising differential approaches to address the varied problems are being given up. Here one may ask me: why is it that I have used, unlike before, so many quotations in this piece? One very short response would be that the present regime does not have the capability to tolerate anything which is different from their perception and understanding. I have had the privilege of participation in quite a few consultative meetings of the government of India post-1991. The Congress had a weakness in implementing policies and programmes; but they would never think of conceiving as enemy and stop engagement with the people who would question their perception and envisaged policies. But the present regime simply does not possess this democratic capability of consultation and debate – anyone having an opinion on either perception or policy differently from them is treated as an enemy. This is how we see a sharp social sector decline – more sharply in the education sector – in India. The present regime has the two-pronged objective whatever the case may be: “In the first, the goal is to control the top of the pyramid; inthe second, the goal is to control the centre of power.” Who cares for the base? In this scheme of things, the historically founded contextual reality of Manipur cannot and should not be made a basis for firm decision-making process for Manipur. Well, it is a long tragic drama for Manipur.