By – Amar Yumnam
A boy walking on foot to buy rice for the family’s meal gets killed in a very unthinkably ferocious way; I just could not complete reading the whole news. Six persons are killed in a way meat is being prepared for cooking.
Nothing has come out of it. The people running the government are busy in photo sessions as Chief Guests in one function or the other. Now my question is: Are not these happenings the failure or absence of governance by the state?
These have now been coupled by the extension of both time and space covered by the Armed Forces Special Powers Act – generally called AFSPA. The BEAUTY of AFSPA is that the security forces can kill anyone without accountability – any killing cannot be questioned in a Court Of Law of the country, including the Supreme Court of India.
Having thought of India and acted in the interest of India around the globe for the last fifty years in both covert and overt way, many questions have started occupying my mind. As the world knows, before Manipur “Merged” with India in 1949, she already had a democratic system based on a Constitution and Parliament of Elected Representatives. The manner of Merger and the statement made by the King even after the enforced signature on the Agreement are common knowledge which are increasingly acknowledged globally by the scholars and recalled by the people of Manipur.
The way events have been allowed to happen particularly since May 2023 raises many questions. First, was there any Clause in the Agreement which ensured freedom to the Indian Security forces Killing Without Accountability? Second, is there any Clause which allowed the Indian security personnel to look the other way when killings happen anywhere in Manipur? The significance of this question particularly arises for my statistics, after allowing for the understatement of numbers, show ONE security personnel for every THREE persons in Manipur; I am afraid if it would be One for every Two. Third, despite the extraordinarily large presence of security personnel, why is it that killings would happen for more than three years continuously?
All these questions lead me to think over the political-economic questions relating to Manipur and ultimately of the Indian state. The benefits of assured and good governance are to be ensured by the state. It is exactly here that I have suspicions about the understanding of the concepts of state and governance by the powers that be in both Imphal and Delhi. Arrogance-associated ignorance can never be a substitute for knowledge-based understanding. The world is just now transiting from debates on knowledge economy to knowledge-application paths of going forward. These happenings have been based on evolution of thinking influenced by the classics (meaning great books which have impacted upon human thinking) from the pre-Christ times till now. I would certainly appeal to digest the evolution of social thinking by reading at least two or three classics and definitely not from the market note-books or listening to some opportunist scholars.
Towards the end, as many times earlier, it would be in place to have a few statements on what a state is and governance is about. A state is: “every class of persons in the community—the statesman, the soldier, the workman—has a certain distinctive type of mind which fits its members for their functions, and that the community essentially consists in the working of these types of mind in their connection with one another, which connection constitutes their subordination to the common good. This working or adjustment obviously depends in the last resort on the qualities present in the innermost souls of the members of the community, and thus the outward organisation of society is really as it were a body which at every point and in every movement expresses the characteristics of a mind. We must not pause here to follow up the consequences of such a conception; but it will be seen at once, by those who reflect upon it, to imply that every individual mind must have its qualities drawn out in various ways to answer to—in fact, to constitute—the relations and functions which make up the community; and that in this sense every mind is a mirror or impression of the whole community from its own peculiar point of view. The ethical assumption or principle of Plato’s conception is, that a healthy organisation of the commonwealth will involve, by a necessary connection, a healthy balance and adjustment of qualities in the individual soul, and vice versa.” And Governance ensures “patterns of human action and relationships that persist and reproduce themselves over time, independently of the identity of the biological individuals performing within them.”
Thus, the state and its governance is never to ensure resort to and prevalence of killing without accountability. If the Indian state cannot function in Manipur without resorting to this, I am ready to offer myself for the game. Lastly, I ask: Is there any democratic governance under the sun where AFSPA-like law prevails and killing without accountability is allowed in an exclusive portion?