India / Manipur: Beyond The Protest

The statesman, December16

By Pradip Phanjoubam

Manipur is on the boil again. There is a blockade on the state’s two lifelines, National Highway 39 and 53, in protest against the move to implement the Tipaimukh High Dam, and there is the renewed agitation for the removal of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, AFSPA, given new vim by Irom Chanu Sharmila shifting the venue of her six-year epic hunger strike in protest against the Armed Forces Special Powers Act to New Delhi.

But then when was the state ever not on a boil, it is hard to remember. There never seemed to have been any shortage of issue worth a bandh or blockade or other forms of violent street protest, and these have indeed become a culture of sort. The next predictable one will be when the Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh comes visiting, probably on December 2, to lay the foundation stone to the Tipaimukh Project. Although there is still a tentative element about the dates of his arrival, advance security cover for him has already arrived from New Delhi.

It seems that Manipur has forgotten to celebrate. It only knows how to observe days of gloom. If there is anything as a dark era, this must be it for the State. While this tells of a somewhat omnipresent oppressive atmosphere, it also speaks volumes of the mindset of its people.

It is as if the place has never seen anything as victory, or any other occasion to celebrate in its recent history. The coincidence is uncanny, but even in areas where victory and defeat are juxtaposed in close proximity of each other, the place has picked out the defeat to make it an occasion to observe and neglect the victory.

Hence, the dark annals the Chahi Taret Khuntakpa (Seven Years of Devastation 1819-1826) under the Ava Kingdom, (Burmese) is observed but not the victory of Maharaja Gambhir Singh and his cousin Nara Singh (who succeed him in later years), which ended the Burmese oppression and paved way for the Treaty of Yandaboo.

There are some celebrations, but these have more to do with religious beliefs and myths, and practically none of these events are from the real world of recorded history. To make it worse, this oppressive mindset is being preached with vehemence and sometimes even brutally enforced.

There is an element of the “hegemony of ideas” in this. It would appear that as much as the missionaries of cultures and religions were guilty of this when they set about conquering the “uncharted” world of the uninitiated “natives”, aggressive revivalism born as resistance to these forces cannot claim innocence either.

In Manipur, while the former has mellowed with age and maturity, it is the revivalist movements that have acquired all the characteristics and fundamentalist zeal of new converts. This cannot be good either for the revivalist movements themselves or for the society at large.

There is tremendous energy and passion in Manipur. But unfortunately, the sense at the moment is one of an impending implosion, rather than of this energy finding creative outlets. It is for this reason that that society must remember its triumphal moments too, and celebrate them with as much fervour as it recalls religiously its moments of defeats and tragedies.

Its intelligentsia must help create the intellectual atmosphere where the state’s children can grow up to be outward looking and positive, rather that be grudging, embittered, angry, negative thinking denizens of the future.

They need to make it their mission to defuse at least some of the suffocating implosive energy that envelops the state, bringing its triumphant marches out of the social cupboard. Both are part and parcel of any given society, but the difference is in how each manages to cope and sublimate them.

The agrarian society had harvests and the first rains of April heralding spring, among others to celebrate. Surely, the modern Manipur society must also have its springs and autumns, apart from its winters and scorching summers of discontent. Let not the cherished fight against oppression become an instrument of oppression itself.

Consider in this light the protest against the Tipaimukh Dam, the pitch which has reached a crescendo. Unfazed, the state government is preparing for a high profile launch of the project with none other than the Prime Minister of India, Dr. Manmohan Singh. In all likelihood, the Government will push the project through despite whatever the nature of the protest, as it had done in the case of the Narmada mega project, but this remains to be seen.

To be honest, lay observers are unsure whom to support.

The arguments of those opposed to the dam are powerful, but it must also be acknowledged that there are people who would be directly affected by the dam, who want the project implemented, although their voices are much less heard. And as Manipur is well aware in these troubled times, decibel power is not always a reliable scale of truth and justice.

What is absolutely certain is that it is a very high stake game that both the proponents and the opponents of the dam are playing. Ironically, both sides very elaborately have spelled out what the other party is bargaining away, but never given much thought to what they themselves may end up bargaining away.

If either side were to take full cognizance of the responsibility they will have to bear for what may be irreparably destroyed or opportunities irretrievably lost, the debate on the controversial dam would have been much more sane, and in equal measure, responsible. At this juncture, responsibility sits lightly on the shoulders of the debaters.

Everything must come with a price, including development, and the real issue ought to have been to work out a balance sheet to find out if the price being paid for the project is worth the benefits to be reaped from it. On the basis of such a balance sheet should the people have been called upon to make their own independent assessments, and not be coerced or browbeaten into accepting or rejecting the proposition.

In the meantime, Manipur must tone down the pitch of its protest culture, and see that there are many bright sides of the state – despite all its dark causes for protest.

The author is Editor, The Imphal Free Press, Manipur