By- Amar Yumnam
Imphal, September 22:
Development is one of the major themes occupying the minds of the great thinkers, scholars occupying with the theme of social transformation and the common citizenry having shared social advancement in mind. While this preoccupation has a very long history at least starting with Plato, Aristotle and Socrates, but during the last nearly three hundred years (having Adam Smith in mind of his 1776 classic on An Enquiry Into The Nature And Causes Of The Wealth of Nations) the growth in speed, direction and method of enquiry have been tremendous; the differentials in approaches have been particularly substantial in the period after World War II. To begin with, Economics happened to dominate the immersion and evolution of thoughts relating to development and till about the mid-1990s this was the dominant trend. But today, the study of Development has undergone a huge transformation.
I have been made to apply my mind on the issue of development with much more contextual issues after listening to the speech in Manipur of the Head of the People of India on his much-delayed visit to the land supposedly in connection with a unprecedented social crisis continuing for more than two years there. My major preoccupation as a student more than half a century back was related to development. The charm of this engagement has attracted me so much so that even as a teacher interacting with the students on this has completed forty-nine years by now. Listening to the Head of the People and examining the contents have been one most painful experience I have undergone in recent years looking around the globe. First, there was no visible display of a commitment to solve the social crisis of more than two years in Manipur. Second, looking at the emphasis on the manner and scale of some investment being made in Manipur had every component of ridicule of the people residing in the land with a long history of independent kingdom. By the way, Manipur was merged with India in 1948, a year after India got Independence from the British occupation.
While managing the personal mental pain, I saw the book titled Reason To Be Happy: Why Logical Thinking Is The Key To A Better Life written by Kaushik Basu, a former Chief Economist of the World Bank and Economic Adviser to the Indian Government, right in front of me on my reading table; I did reopen the book. In a case of opposite experience to Manipur, he writes of the contemporary global experience: “As globalization gains pace, with goods and capital flows across nations, human prospects have increasingly come under a common umbrella, with shared concerns as well as shared hope”. He also mentions of “the existential moment the dinosaurs faced sixty-six million years ago. They too may have seen clouds gather on the horizon, but they were mute spectators who had no volition and would soon be extinct, becoming fossils for human beings to dig out, dissect and display in museums millions of years later.” I could not go further on what he talks of the advantages human beings have today.
On the other hand, the ridicule immediately drew my attention on a legislation India has got and to be applied only to the land and the people therein in the Northeastern part of India (Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura) titled The Armed Forces Special Powers Act 1958 under wish “Any commissioned officer, warrant officer, non-commissioned officer or any other person of equivalent rank in the armed forces”, and if any area is declared Disturbed, any person can be arrested and killed without establishing any reason and only on grounds of suspicion. The acts amounting even to killing of an individual cannot be questioned in any Court of Justice. It immediately occurred to me that it has been full sixty-seven years that this legislation has been in existence for application only to this part of India. My internal query naturally arose: Why is it that India has not been able to evolve a kind of development model for her northeastern part for seven decades such that her claims on democracy get much strengthened; exercising the power to kill any citizen of differentiated communities of small size by the armed forces without any accountability can never be a respectable quality of any democracy.
Even further, the ridicule made me reappreciate the present understanding of development is no longer the exclusive interpretation in Economics only. Economics too– unlike before the mid-1990s- is by now so linked up with other Social Science (including Philosophy) disciplines to correct her weaknesses and strengthen her policy effectiveness; in this the issues of Justice and Morality are inherent components.
Let me end with Kartik Muralidharan who writes in his book Accelerating India’s Development: A State-Led Roadmap For Effective Governance (2024): “[B]oth theory and evidence suggest that India is highly centralized…This has contributed to (a) weak democratic accountability for service delivery, (b) governments that are slow to respond to citizen needs by being too far away from the people, (c) ineffective public expenditure that is not a good fit for local conditions, and (d) limited development of local capacity and leadership for governance and service delivery”. SO MANIPUR SHOULD NOT BE ALLOWED TO LINK UP WITH ANY POTENTIAL DEVELOPMENT MODEL – a non-violable official motto.