By – Amar Yumnam
Imphal, December 1:
A recent Report by an international Team of Scientists has established that during the Ice Age the bamboo could no longer bear the cold and disappeared in most places of the world; this happened in the Europe too. The same Team has established that the bamboo survived in Manipur. They are talking of the scenario of 37,000 years ago. When I shared this information with a long-time friend of mine, he said we are talking of what was the picture 370 centuries ago from today; this sounds more attractive and attuned to the common way of speaking.
This establishes scientifically and with a rationality that the natural things and lives of the place cannot be destroyed and made disappear from the place; Sangai is a life form found only in this comparatively small place. While talking of nature, I am reminded of what R. G. Collingwood wrote in his The Idea of Nature: “The modern view of Nature owes something both to Greek and to Renaissance cosmology, but it differs from each in fundamental ways. To describe the differences with precision is not easy, because the movement is still young and has not yet had the time to ripen its ideas for systematic statement. We are confronted not so much with a new cosmology as with a large number of new cosmological experiments, all very disconcerting if looked at from the Renaissance point of view, and all to some extent animated by what we can recognize as a single spirit; but to define this spirit is very difficult. We can, however, describe the kind of experience on which it is based, and so indicate the starting-point of this movement.” While talking of Manipur, it should not be lost from our mind that she is basically South-East Asian though constituting a part of a single country with a large South Asian portion. This differentiation naturally establishes the fundamental differences in the qualitative characteristics of social institutions and natural conditions. Putting it in short, contemporary ideas and schools of thought emphasise in no uncertain terms that any public policy should be contextual. As John Rawls puts it emphatically in his Theory of Justice: “‘The definitive idea for deliberative democracy is the idea of deliberation itself. When citizens deliberate, they exchange views and debate their supporting reasons concerning public political questions.’’ Our own Amartya Sen in his Idea of Justice also emphasises the imperative of appreciating: “we have to pay particular attention to both the content of what can be called development and to the interpretation of democracy (in particular to the respective roles of voting and of public reasoning). The assessment of development cannot be divorced from the lives that people can lead and the real freedom that they enjoy. Development can scarcely be seen merely in terms of enhancement of inanimate objects of convenience, such as a rise in the GNP (or in personal incomes), or industrialization – important as they may be as means to the real ends. Their value must depend on what they do to the lives and freedom of the people involved, which must be central to the idea of development.” By the same logic, the security forces should equally follow the same principles for the shared welfare of the people and to create and sustain a positive relationship for social peace; the recent police behavioural case of a school girl being just pulling out by the legs after being hit and killed by a police bus can never be repeated.
In what all are happening in Manipur today, we see the absence of understanding of bureaucratic rationality among the government officials; bureaucratic rationality has been a common knowledge since the contributions of Max Weber in the late 1950s. While the understanding of Rationality earlier was being looked upon from a particular angle, it is now being looked from multiple dimensions in an inclusive way. The lack of knowledge as to how a government policy should be perceived as understood particularly since the beginning of this century is revealed in every display of functioning by the present government. The best example of this is the repeated reports of the police destroying the poppy plants. An approach alive to the present knowledge of policy would be when the alternative utilisation after the destruction of poppy plants is also simultaneously put in place. The highly delayed and incomplete destruction of poppy plants can never be considered as a policy. Though there are feelings like a plan in place to destroy the society of Manipur, she can never be destroyed; the social resilience is healthy at the core.