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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 UGs. 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 AFSPA, a
license 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 favor 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 Govt. 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 Rishang Keishing as his men left in
droves to join a coalition Govt. 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 hot pant.
Looting the looter
Consequently, the list of people’s
frustrations and complains is getting longer
and longer but theirs tempers have become
shorter and shorter. Every imaginable
Government job carries a heavy price. The
criterion 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. They 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.
The author is a former Indian Foreign
Service Service Officer. |
