The elections to the 10th Manipur Legislative Assembly is barely a week away, yet the atmosphere continues to be marked by a deafening silence, thanks largely to the strictures introduced to the electioneering process by the Election Commission of India, ECI, including a very low ceiling of Rs. 8 lakhs permissible campaign expenditures by each candidate. Obviously, the candidates would be spending much more than the specified amount, though covertly, but at least these are no longer the blatant affronts they once were. The assault on the dignity of the conscientious by overt purchases of votes with hard cash was once undisguised. What is worse, these unholy transactions had become an accepted norm, and not only those buying votes, but also those selling them had become so desensitised that they would actually haggle on how much their votes should cost. There were also extremely cynical suggestions from seemingly sane people asking the voters to take money from whoever offers it, but vote per their judgment alone. This is meant as a punishment of those offering money. But such moral breaches are never so easy to plug. Like drug, the lure of unearned money is insatiable and such attitudes have only ended up spreading a contagious corrupting influence everywhere. The fact that elections in Manipur have reached the bottom of the corruption pit today is evidence of this. Hopefully the radical changes in the structure of permissible election campaigns would reverse the trend and clean up what is undoubtedly the most fundamental feature of any democratic polity.
The silence however is regularly broken by a parallel macabre campaign of bomb blasts. A number of underground organisations have come together under the banner of CorCom to have the ruling Congress(I) defeated. They have left a violent trail of targeting the party’s offices and candidates, the latest to face the brunt being the Speaker of the current Assembly, Irengbam Hemochandra. A bomb assault in his residence resulted in the tragic death of one person and injury to four others. Undeterred the Congress has fielded candidates in all the 60 constituencies of the state. In this way, other than the contest between the Congress and the other political parties for supremacy in the next Assembly, this round of elections would also very much be a virtual referendum on the public support for the underground movement. For although the ban by these groups is on the Congress alone, the voters are free to exercise their personal choices on where they put their loyalties by the secret ballot on January 28. If under the circumstance, the voters still show their preference for the Congress, the message should be very clear as to who they are disenchanted with. It would also mean that if the Congress does get routed beyond expectations, it cannot put all blames to the violent campaigns against it, for though they could not campaign, the voters still would have exercise their free wills on either choosing or dumping the party. Whichever way the electoral fortunes swing this time, let the lesson be learnt by all parties involved and be humble enough to admit they have to change their ways so as to be the true representatives of the aspirations of the people they all claim.
This round of elections would also be interesting from the point of view of the entry of the Nagaland Peoples’ Front, NPF, into the fray. The success or failure of this party would also be a measure of the claims of support of the larger public of the “Naga districts” either for Naga integration or Manipur integrity. Here too the peoples’ verdict must be respected. Obviously the party cannot hope to win a majority in the Manipur Assembly for it is setting up only 12 candidates, but the Nagaland chief minister, Niphieu Rio, whose party the NPF is, gave an interesting twist when in his campaign speeches he said his party would join hands with the non-Congress parties to be part of the next government in Manipur. This must have to be described as the height of political ambition, or more precisely irony. Here is a party campaigning for the dismemberment of Manipur, nurturing hopes that it would be part of the next government in Manipur by teaming up with parties, all of which have sworn to fight to all extent any campaign to disintegrate Manipur. It will be interesting to watch what qualifications the political parties prefix or suffix to all the pre-poll polemic after the election results are out on March 6 in order to make their marriages of convenience.