By – Amar Yumnam
Imphal, May 12:
The happenings in the last two years in Manipur and the very recent brief war with Pakistan have some very critical lessons for India. First, what all have happened in Manipur have been at the regional level. These naturally have had immediate impacts and long-term implications; both these have had meanings expressing at both the individual and the societal levels. These will be socially negating the behavioural historical experiences of equality. Second, the recent brief war with Pakistan has displayed a rich manifestation of a shared political character to stand together in any case a foreign country tries to adversely affect our autonomous existence.
Both of these have thrown upon us a kind of situation wherein our normal functioning of governance gets highly disturbed, focus of governance capability goes fast alteration, the social debates, mobilizations, and relaxation undergo changes in a unidirectional way, the interrelationship among political parties move towards the single commitment for national protection and so on. This implies that both the negative and the positive effects and influences converge on the singular national interest. However, these effects have been a generalized one in the case of the attack on the neighbouring country consequent upon the terror killing of common people in the Northernmost province of India. In the case of the two years-old provincial conflicts – including killings and heavy displacements of poor people – there was no shared generalized interest at the level of the country. Besides, heavy politicking, there were four signs of very negative behavioural manifestations towards the province: (A) It was as if being treated as sacrificially affordable. (B) The diversity of land and people was something to be seriously treated for union at the country-level while it was to be emphasized for convenient administration at the provincial level. (C) Being extraordinarily careful at the northern portion about foreign influences, it is something which can be let happen as to whatever in the north-eastern portion. (D) The values and the principles of federalism are of paramountcy at the peak when something happens in the north of the country, these are of lesser importance, if any, in the region bordering Myanmar.
My interest here is not the differential provincial revelations of character of the unitary administration on varied issues. I am concerned about the varied big present and future implications a common consequential event.
Before I talk about the problem, let me put a few lines on the usual prevailing scenario in a country while facing war with a neighbouring country.
Abraham Lincoln was very appreciative of one individual: “All honour to Jefferson, the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so to embalm it there that today, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression!” Thomas Jefferson (1777) was so concerned about representation and writing to John Adams: “The point of representation is what most alarms me, as I fear the great and small colonies are bitterly determined not to cede. Will you be so good as to collect the proposition I formerly made you in private, and try if you can work it into some good to save our union? It was, that any proposition might be negatived by the representatives of a majority of the people of America, or of a majority of the colonies of America. The former secures the larger, the latter, the smaller colonies. I have mentioned it to many here. The good Whigs, I think, will so far cede their opinions for the sake of the Union, and others we care little for.” What I am afraid is if India still needs to resolve this issue of large and small. Further, Willliam Nordhaus put the cost of any modern war very clearly: “In recent times, the costs of the Vietnam War were grossly underestimated even as the build up occurred. The original budget projection in early 1966 underestimated the cost for the subsequent fiscal year by $10 billion, or about 1.5 percent of GDP. In assuming that the war would end by June 1967, the Pentagon underestimated the total cost of the war by around 90 percent. The war in fact dragged on until 1973, and the total direct cost was in the range of $110 billion to $150 billion. The indirect costs were more difficult to gauge but comprised inflation and economic instability, civil unrest, and, some have argued, a growing disenchantment with authority and government in the United States.”
Recalling what Giovanni Dosi, Richard R. Nelson, and Sidney G. Winter (2002) questioned: “It is familiar enough that business firms and other organizations ‘know how to do things’—things like building automobiles or computers, or flying us from one continent to another. On second thoughts, what does this mean? Is there not a sense in which only a human mind can possess knowledge? If so, can this proposition somehow be squared with the idea that organizations know how to do things? And if organizational knowledge is a real phenomenon, what are the principles that govern how it is acquired, maintained, extended, and sometimes lost? Our focus here is on the particular forms of organizational knowledge that account for the organization’s ability toper form and extend its characteristic ‘output’ actions—particularly, the creation of a tangible product or the provision of a service, and the development of new products and services.”
I am also exactly concerned with this type of questions; I take Education as the most important question for education happens to be the means with which a society could attempt to move forward and recover the lost. Consequent upon the social crisis, there have been many cases of exodus of younger age children from Manipur to the other parts of India. Then came the war with the bordering country in the northwest. This naturally created the need for shifting out of the border regions in this country as the Manipur Effect was felt there as well. Though the immediacy has been removed, the differential impact on the thinking mind of the parents cannot be forgotten. Given this reality and since education can never be sacrificed in the contemporary world, there is an immediate necessity for creating a policy under which education at the lower levels be invariably provided whatever happens at provincial or country-levels. India can now afford to do this. While there may not be the exact atmosphere at the institutes, the minimum education should be ensured for all. War and conflicts should not be factors affecting provision of education of children and youths.
