By – Amar Yumnam
Imphal, Nov 4:
Any society emerges from the foundation of trust. Interactions over time create and sustain an atmosphere of trust in small groups and ultimately extends to larger compositions to establish a robust foundation for social formation. This is how a society emerges and sustains over time. This founding on trust is inevitable for without it the society would not even emerge.
The strength and beauty of Manipur, as historically experienced, has been the prevalence of trust across the diverse ethnicities. The exogenous infusion of differential religious and cultural factors has not been able to eat into the robustness of the moral strength of networking trust in Manipur.
As I have been emphasizing in this column, the ongoing crisis in Manipur started as a political agendum. The non-addressal at this stage enabled the problem to acquire the social dimension to become a socio-political problem. Despite the problem becoming socio-political one, there did not seem any sense of urgency on the part of the government to address the issue. Whenever a socio-political crisis lingers over a period, particularly in a less developed region, the livelihood of the people would become increasingly disturbed. This decline in livelihood opportunities would necessarily generate deeper and deeper economic inequalities in the society. This is exactly what has happened in the case of Manipur. The problem is now a full-fledged socio-politico-economic crisis. The manifest tragedy doubling this crisis is the non-full-scale governance response to the full-fledged socio-politico-economic crisis.
It is natural that such a crisis would definitely generate feelings of suspicion. In the case of Manipur, the feelings of suspicion are already visible within and across ethnicities in the State. It goes without saying that an atmosphere of suspicion would always be exclusionary in social perspectives of any group and persons. This is quite contrary to the necessity and immediacy of inclusiveness in re-articulating the social needs of Manipur and the evolution of political-economic policies. The legacy of Manipur was allowed to be increasingly destroyed.
When the problem first started with articulation along political lines, the governance should have come alive to the potential to question the shared legacy of Manipur. There are three global scenarios to be kept in mind in the present context. First, attempts to provide historical narratives rather than history are very common today. As Lowenthal (1998) puts heritage can be “our own marvellously malleable creation”. Second, the South-East Asian political economic scenario (particularly relating to Myanmar) would certainly make it inevitable for the affected groups to articulate heritage with implications for territory.
Third, in the context of the first two reasons, we have a political reality where the Indian and regional authorities do not find time to apply mind on the implications of the happenings in South East Asia. We are now in a situation so wonderfully put by McDowell (2008): “It [heritage] is a process that draws on the past and which is intimately related to our identity requirements in the present. We manipulate it for validation, legitimization and unity and we call on it in order to challenge, refute and undermine. Heritage is often political and often territorial, serving certain agencies and groups through communicating narratives of inclusion and exclusion, continuity and instability. All in all it is a complex subject which cannot be separated from the interrelated concepts of memory and identity.”
The transformation to a full-scale socio-politico-economic crisis naturally brings in the articulations for identity. Researching on political polarisation and social issues in the Unites States, Gennaioli and Tabellini (2023) asserts: “In political economics, a group is typically defined based on shared economic interests or common policy preferences. [There is] an additional important feature of social groups: whether its members are also aware of their group identity. This property has profound implications, because identification with a group amplifies belief distortions and political extremism, and it can be switched on or off by economic shocks or other changes in the salience of conflict dimensions.”
Let me borrow from Ross Poole (1999) on what could have been the factors for the emergence and sustenance of a civilisation based in Manipur: “First: The development of market relations eroded earlier forms of self-sufficient rural life and created a network of interdependence and mobility, initially in more or less well-defined territories. This provided the social space within which a conception of the nation could take root. Second: The State was increasingly able to monopolise coercive power within a defined area; it also developed new forms of administration and intervention. It became a constitutive presence in almost all aspects of social life. Third: The development of vernacular print language and the new printing technologies and forms of media allowed for the development of public spheres in which national cultures were developed and disseminated.”
Now it is relating to these very foundations of Manipur Civilisation where the issues are arising. Any further governance inaction would be highly costly – nationally, politically and economically. In fact, even assuming that the crisis is resolved today, the political-economic impacts would linger for at least a decade and a half. The group and inter-group perceptions on society and conflicts should be fully explored as they happen today. The policy responses should be framed on the basis of this exploration. There is immediacy in all this for the core qualitative strength of Manipur is getting increasingly weakened.
