By – Amar Yumnam
Imphal, Nov 11:
The socio-politico-economic crisis of Manipur has certainly compromised the rich historical legacy of healthy inter-ethnic relationships to almost constitute a shared society with diverse constituents. While not fully jeopardised, this is being increasingly threatened by a new social ethos of suspicion. One unique pride of Manipur society is the elevated pedestal at which the women are socially placed. Now this is also being disrespected. The present period is the period of Ningol Chakkouba during which each family endeavours to see to it that every woman in the family and every woman married to other families are ensured personal and emotional satisfaction and happiness. Now who cares! Look at the recent happenings and look at who gets killed. From a society which honours the social place of women, Manipur is now a place where women would get killed just like that.
This sacrifice of social character is not something which has fallen from the sky; it is a result of the ongoing socio-politico-economic crisis. This crisis has sharply revealed three features of Manipur administration and Indian polity.
The first sharp and unfortunate manifestation relates to the character and quality of governance at the level of Manipur. While there are many approaches to understand and analyse governance, we may just refer to what the Economics Nobel Laureate Oliver Williamson had put forth in his 1996 book The Mechanisms of Governance. On page 12 he writes: “Intuition tells us that simple governance structures should mediate simple transactions and that complex governance structures should be reserved for complex transactions. Using a complex structure to govern a simple transaction incurs unneeded costs, and using a simple structure to govern a complex transaction invites strain. But what is simple and complex in transactional and governance respects?” Answering this, he writes (p. 13): “If the “natural” way to manage transactions is through authority (hierarchy), then the presumption that “in the beginning there were markets” must be reversed. Authority is something with which we have direct experience (in managing households and more generally) and think that we understand. By comparison, markets are where the subtleties reside.” There is the necessity to explore areas which present “differential hazards”. Given this, Williamson asserts to look for “what the attributes are on which governance structures differ that have hazard mitigation consequences.”
Further “in order to establish better why governance structures differ in discrete structural ways, it asks why one form of organization (e.g., hierarchy) is unable to replicate the mechanisms found to be efficacious in another (e.g., the market). The object is to implement this micro-analytic program, this interdisciplinary joinder of law, economics, and organization, in a “modest, slow, molecular, definitive” way.” Given this approach, Williamson writes (p. 14): “Variety notwithstanding, all these hazards entail variations on the following themes: (1) All the hazards would vanish but for the twin conditions of bounded rationality and opportunism; (2) the action resides in the details of transactions and the mechanisms of governance; and (3) superior performance is realized by working out of a farsighted but incomplete contracting setup in which the object is to use institutions as (cost-effective) instruments for hazard mitigation. To repeat, the identification, explication, and mitigation of hazards through governance are what transaction cost economics is.”
But what has happened with the governance in Manipur is the absolute absence of any attempt to understand the nature of the crisis right from the beginning till today. This is how, as I keep emphasising in my pieces, the initial social issue has now evolved into a full-fledged socio-politico-economic crisis. Since the governance at the Manipur level has not attempted to diagnose, understand and evolve policy responses to the emerging problems, there has not been ipso facto any strong and compulsive pressure on the federal powers to attend to the crisis. Thus, there are no compulsive signs for diagnosing the components and the nature of the Manipur crisis on the federal powers.
The natural side-effect of this has been the evasive approach adopted by the national security forces on the imperative to control the killings taking place in areas where they could establish normalcy with ease. Now this behavioural manifestation of the national security forces has not been without cost. While suspicion is evolving as a new social ethos, the credibility of the national security forces is suffering a nose-dive among the general population. This is a very unfortunate thing in the sense that even the groups they now seem indirectly facilitating would naturally not cultivate a long-term trust of them; a heavy national cost being incurred in a region with global political economic implications.
The upshot of my argument is that Manipur now pays the price of non-committed governance functioning from both the levels of governance – the regional as well as the federal. The unfolding consequence is the declining trust between the government and the governed. This is not a right approach to governance from any perspective one may look. Let me end with a quote from Augie Fleras (The Politics of Multiculturalism, 2009, p. 222): “a multicultural governance of many cultures is possible if the appropriate architecture is in place. For a successful multicultural governance, a shared framework seems indispensable, one in which everyone abides by agreed-upon rules, embraces a common blueprint for living together with differences, agrees to the principle of agreeing to disagree, and partakes of the principles and practices of a shared citizenship. A perspective is required that emphasizes the importance of both national identity and national laws in addition to a sensitivity to cultural differences since individuals experiences continue to be grounded in group identities. No less pivotal is the centrality of connections between diversities and difference—about social solidarity not separateness.”
