Few spots on earth can rival the
natural beauty of Manipur valley fenced from all sides by blue mountains with
the Loktak Lake in the middle, the largest fresh water lake in eastern
India. The inhabitants fondly called this
fertile plateau ‘sana leipak’, a land of gold. Nature here is kind and
endearing. It is pleasantly warm in summer but never gets hot as ‘hot’ is
understood in mainland India. Winter is mild and sunny, prefixed and suffixed
by smiling autumn and spring. It is indeed a veritable paradise on earth.
I
was born and brought up here. My children too were born here but brought up
abroad across the continents where my diplomatic assignments took me. As our
family has now spread over across the globe, none of us live in Manipur
anymore. But we love the land. It bears the original mark of our identity. It
is our cradle, the original nest, the beginning of our existence. This land is
the only spot on earth that we can legitimately claim our own. No other place can
take its position. Manipur was our
homeland.
Breaking Silence
Since I left
D.M.College, Imphal in 1963 and joined government service in 1967, I hardly had
time to stay in Manipur except for occasional visits lasting a month or less.
My longest stay at a stretch was seven months in 2003 after my retirement. My
recent visit in 2004 lasted from August 22-October 12. Every time I visited
Manipur I had to fight within me the temptation to write what I saw and heard
but resisted for care of hurting the sentiments of my people whom I love and
cherish. This time I changed my earlier view. My conscience or inner voice told
me that for the love of the land and its people I must speak out and that every
soul that cares his or her land and people should gather strength and courage
to speak out. For passive silence and toleration of wrongs amount to tacit
approval of the evils which have been afflicting the land and its people.
The Killing Field
Manipur of
to-day is no longer Manipur that was. The society has now gone back to the
Hobbesian state of nature where people live in continual fear and danger of
violent death, where life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, where
swords but not words reign supreme and where they embrace not with loving arms
but with deadly arms of AK-47s. It has become a land of the living dead where
they empty out their anger and frustration from the barrel of guns. Whichever
side you turn, you see uniformed men with deathly toys in their hands. On the
streets are government security personnel and those in the backyard are the
so-called Ugs (underground soldiers). They all wear uniforms and batches and
carry weapons. They co-exist side by side. They are afraid of each other
because they too are mortals and the toys they carry kill effectively and
mercilessly.
The worst
part of it is that much before they kill you, they kill your freedom first. All
these in the great name of freedom and integrity. One side kills to defend
freedom and integrity of the whole country and the other side kills to demand
and achieve freedom. One side is armed with Armed Forces Special Powers Act
(AFSPA), a licence to kill a suspect with immunity from legal prosecution which
is a clear negation of the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution.
The danger point in this is that a suspect is not necessarily the culprit and
the obnoxious act provides a big room for an innocent to suffer unjustly. As a
father has a duty to discipline a disobedient child but not to kill, the
government has also the same rights and responsibilities but not to kill except
through due process of law. AFSPA is a negation of that due process and no
amount of articulation in its favour will justify its existence.
A Failed State
The more
realistic issue is: what necessitates the imposition of such a draconian law as
the AFSPA? Let’s see the picture of
Manipur. According to my observation, Manipur has since long become a failed
State. Corruption of all kinds has eaten away its foundations and the machinery
therefore inevitably collapsed. Elected members with little or no vision at all
have been busy making ministry after ministry but never have the time to run
the government. It is a State where every elected MLA, in a ceaseless war of
position, is vying to become a Minister. If he is not given a berth in the
Cabinet, he rebels and plots to bring the Ministry down to form another one. If
I remember correctly, at one point of time the Opposition had a solitary
Congress member namely Mr. Rishang Keishing as his men left in droves to join a
coalition government. Party affiliation and loyalty has little or no meaning
amongst the foxy Judas Iskariots whose culture is thriving on outward
allegiance and inner betrayal.
A House of Cards
Only a stable
House can provide a stable government. Unfortunately, Manipur for long has been
having only a house of cards which collapsed at every knock of power-hungry
politicians. Ministry after Ministry fell like ninepins and elections after
elections held in the past returned more and more ambitious members bend on
looting the coffers of the State to make good their election expenses and amass
some for the next elections. I was told time and again that, on paper,
successive ministries had already undertaken projects after projects, dammed
and bridged every river and nullah worth its name, terraced every imaginable
hillside for cultivation, provided almost every village some form of schools
with complimentary teaching and administrative staff, health centers and
dispensaries, electricity and potable water supply. The list is endless but the
reality is shorter than a hotpant.
Looting the looter
Consequently,
the list of people’s frustrations and complaints is getting longer and longer
but their tempers have become shorter and shorter. Every imaginable government
job carries a heavy price. The criteria in the employment market is money. You
pay the price, you get the post. Nothing is possible without money and nothing
is impossible with money. Thousands of educated unemployed youths who cannot
afford to buy employment either have to go outside the State to seek employment
or to sit idle at home indulging in drugs or to take up arms and join the
underground outfit. The ongoing famous saying in Manipur is that if you want to
build a good house and provide economic and physical security to your family,
join the underground. It is a sad alternative to joining election politics but
equally and immorally lucrative. The new equation is simple and
straightforward: politicians loot and you loot politicians.
Believe
it or not, this is the way the system operates in Manipur. The Ugs now decide
who will get elected. And once elected, it is the turn of the elect to support
the electors and oblige their demands and wishes. It is a classic remake of
Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein and the monster he created. There was a time when a
voter actually and in person cast his or her vote in the ballot box at the
polling booth. Even now, on paper, a voter still casts his/her vote in the
ballot box in a polling booth but with a difference: now an unseen hand casts
the vote for the highest bidder through the barrel of a gun. That is the way
our proxy democracy operates in many areas in Manipur. It’s a complete sham but
it works in its own fashion. You loot the looter through democratic machinery
and share the booty. Nothing official about it, as the advertisement goes.
Dead Voters
I was told
that the number of houses officially declared and registered in the villages is
much more than the actual number of houses, and accordingly the number of
voters too. It is indeed an inflation of a strange kind perhaps not found
anywhere on earth. How could this happen? Because enumeration in Manipur is a
great political bargaining game. In some areas, there are more voters than the
population. The dead do not die here for good; they faithfully surface again at
the time of elections. If you sit with any official and ask his experience on
election duties, he will tell you many juicy election tales that you will never
find even in a book of fiction. Strange things happen naturally in this land of
deception, a paradise turned into a blazing inferno by its own people. It certainly beats Dante’s inferno.
-PART ONE
ENDS-
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