By – Amar Yumnam
Imphal, September 8:
Right from the middle-schooling stages, my preference for Charles Dickens has always prevailed upon the one for William Shakespeare. It had nothing to do with the lack of charm and beauty of the emotions, relationships, controlled social contexts in certain instances, the behavioural influences of the powers that be and many other dimensions of human life reflected in the works of Shakespeare. These were all beautiful. But for me life was one of fullness with real life issues from the medium school stages till about fair advancement in professional careership. This is where the appeal and personal responsibilities being taught by the writings of Charles Dickens were very relevant. Being the eldest son of my parents, my father made it for sure that I was made to possess sure concern not only for myself but for the juniors as well. This was the beginning of looking at the issues in a larger context and not only for myself. In this it was also – on hindsight I realized – how the tendency for thinking only for myself was to be controlled and avoided. This is where my mother becomes very attractive as the medium for understanding the larger frame and the appreciation of shortages as shared lessons, I think this is how I started absorbing the framework components of the lessons of social life without compromising with personal efficiency. The very term of Great Expectations and the life story of David Copperfield have wonderful social perspectives filled with valued morality. No society can prosper without a contextualized and perpetually enriched moral values.
I have particularly related the personal story for the political plays in Manipur are trying hard only to destroy the social of Manipur. Whatever the case, for the Manipuris the crisis has been social lock, stock and barrel. But the political dramas have indulged in efforts to understand this as ethical conflict. Despite the weaknesses in the development front, we can never deny the existence of a society, a multifaceted culture, and a kind of equality founded on history and expressed behaviourically at the societal level. All these have been with unique social values, moral responsibilities and interpersonal implications. We do not, however, deny that there could be cases of aberrations and exploitations.
But a society can never be understood, valued, interrelated and practiced only at a village level. A society can prevail long term and ensure existence in the global forum of nations only if there is a substantial number of villages with feasible contextual strengths. There is no limited contextual condition about people and social aptitudes across the societies across the globe. There could be more than one group in a particular society and these could be possessing differential norms and methods of functioning. In order to create the feasibility of co-existence, shared functioning and evolution into higher forms, these groups have to agree to the mutual interactions across the various groups with norms evolved over generations.
This is exactly where the role of the state arises. Manipur is not something which has fallen from the sky. She has been a product of history where factors of people, the context of the people (geography), the similarity or differential properties of people and geography and the social and demo-geographics realities of the surrounding places had played their roles in the evolution of the land of Manipur.
From a South East Asian context, Manipur merged into the dynamics of the South Asian context in 1949. The most unfortunate character of this merger has been the fastening failure of the pre-merger characteristics of the state of Manipur thanks to the absolute unwillingness to appreciate the inherited social values and strengths by the Indian state. Any kind of attempts to build a nation would not be a right approach with regions of such varied contextual history. Further continuous divisions of such regions into ever smaller ones based on such varied social inheritance would never make any nation stronger.
This failure to appreciate the inherited history of Manipur has led to the arrival of humanitarian emergencies. The most unfortunate part is that these humanitarian emergencies have been allowed to persist for more than two years by the federal authority of India. The response which demands urgency is the addressal of developmental emergencies to take care of the humanitarian issues. But instead of addressing the social emergencies expected from any state endeavouring to establish a place in the globe of nations, the political dramas have been the weapons used for curing the social crisis which naturally only sustained and worsened the scenario. What we have seen is the absence of a strategy of competitive, generalized and shared development intervention in the context historically inherited instead of the political dramas among the people with poor capabilities.
What has been the meaning of the last more than two years is that Manipur is facing an unprecedented kind of risk and uncertainty. It is the responsibility of the state to see to it that these are taken care of sooner than later. It is this which would ensure the future of the younger generation. These are what the state has not bothered to take care for more than two years. Will these be addressed now?
