By – Amar Yumnam
I would like to begin my piece today with a lovely principle for application of mind Amartya Sen had asserted: “it is better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong.” But in a very unfortunate way, all seem to be precisely wrong everywhere in Manipur. The most socially significant and very unfortunate wrong is the non-appearance of any signal of application of mind to the social crises of Manipur. Remembering the inimitable social thinker Shri Arambam Somorendra Singh, I had said: “The case of Manipur, in so far as development interventions are concerned, has been anything other than endogenous. On the other hand, the interventions have been rather to exploit the contextual diversity for exogenous benefits and resulting in unprecedented conflicts.” I had said of these seven years back looking at the qualitative values of policy intervention of the time. Now the situation is characterised by additional negative features affecting both the qualitative and the quantitative dimensions of governance. The most disturbing feature of this new approach is the underlying approach to cause social division in a way Manipur has never experienced ever. This division is being attempted so highly along non-Manipur-like ethnic lines and seeing to it that the adverse effects reach the individuals. In other words, the public policy values have no content relating to the social values which have been the civilisational components of Manipur. Before I make any statement further, let me put in emphatic terms that Manipur’s is a society with civilisational values running in a thousand years at least. Three things inter alia are highly visible in Manipur today: A. There is no application of mind and attempt to restore the kind of social values by the governance. Instead, as stated before, undisclosed administrative behaviourism is stark to destroy any strength characterising the Manipur social. B. While the attempt to destroy the inherited social values and accompanying strengths of Manipur are being made, there are simultaneous administrative endeavours to project everything along ethnic lines and not along the name and values of the Kingdom. C. One very painful thing I see every morning – in cities outside the region of India beyond West Bengal – around 9 o’clock in the morning is a boy of only around 12 or 13 putting up the garbage – both heavy and light – to the wastage transport truck. In this, the supervising elder would scold the kid in a very rough way for not doing things right; I don’t know what is right or wrong in this. The governance in Manipur today is displaying the craze to see Manipur evolving towards this kind of social existence.
The social pains being felt and without any administrative commitment to put a halt to the decline of civilizational are difficult to bear. These take me back to the issues of Public Policy Values as enumerated by Jenny Stewart as are all visible and being felt in Manipur: i. Structural separation – wherein “[A]symmetrical governance structures derail productive debate”; ii. Hybridisation in which governance measures “give very little guidance for dealing with conflict”; iii. Casuistry in which we see the “governments do not wish to be seen to be robbing Peter to pay Paul, even if this is what they are doing”; iv. Incrementalism which “generates a short-term response to perceived need for change, while avoiding the need to engage in more deep-seated analysis”; v. Bias in which “analysis of the policy process has shown the importance of knowledge in underpinning the exercise of power in policy communities, by forcing those who wish to take part, to ‘speak the language’ of the dominant course; and vi. Cycling which “is a form of sequential attention-giving…..Flip-flops are repeated, usually low-key patterns of alteration, whereas backlashes are more dramatic in character.”
While the absence of governance is visible in both qualitative and quantitative terms in Manipur, a very painful consequential effect has now shown an additional painful display. We all know for sure that there is no intention and hence no application of mind to evolve policies to resolve the three years old social crisis of Manipur. It is a crisis of Manipur, but there are attempts by governance and agents of governance to highlight this as an inter-ethnic crisis and allow it to continue like that. The most painful consequential outcome of this is the emergence of suicides of growing teenagers who have been staying in the homes of the displaced. We all know that these children must be in either schools or colleges continuing their education with spirits of competition. They must naturally have been sustaining wishes to achieve something in their life. The long years of stay in the homes of the displaced families and with no visible signs of solving this issue must have made them to feel the meaninglessness of living further as there is no scope to pursue their ambitions. Destroying the ambitions of the youths along with their lives is the surest way to finish the further existence of Manipur.
