By Amar Yumnam
Lord Byron depicted Napoleon in his Age of Bronze thus:
“Whose game was empires and whose stakes were thrones,
Whose table earth—whose dice were human bones.”
Napoleon was a conqueror and he had big dreams of extending his reign over vast expanses of culture, demography and territory. His targets were the sovereign kingdoms around and far. The casualties in such pursuits necessarily had to be the rulers in those sovereign countries. The collateral cost of these pursuits of expansion of empire had to be the loss of lives. Given the character of institutions (formal as well as informal) in those eras, the level of technology and the scope for pursuit of prosperity, there is a logic and consistency in the Napoleon’s chase for goals unmindful of the means.
But the world has undergone phases of transformation in the logic of nation-building, understanding the human costs of pursuing goals without bothering about means, and appreciation of the limits of one-sided actions. These have been accompanied by path-breaking changes in philosophy of life, outlook for coexistence individually and collectively, the huge potential of exchanges as a substitute for wars to cause prosperity,
Paraphrasing Byron, we may now ponder as to what game the social agents are playing in Manipur. The people as a whole are all social agents. But the common people are not as such large in their domain of influence and so their actions are not highly impactful. This is where we need to identify the principal agents of sustenance and change in our society. In every social structure and in every stage of societal evolution it has been found that the principal agents have been the determinants of the direction and speed of change, whether of prosperity or line. Here we may think of, in the context of Manipur, the principal agents who now decide on the character and direction of social change in Manipur. In this, we have the political elites. These are followed by the bureaucrats. Among these the most important ones are the ministers holding portfolios and the institutional heads heading various departments and institutions. The way the events and the scenarios are getting unfolded in Manipur, we have to examine the nature of the games they play with information even of violation of social and democratic propriety by the principal agents is emerging.
In the game of Napoleon, the game he was playing definitely had an encompassing component of the interests of the common men of the country. He knew pretty well also that his immediate circle of support had to be awarded even more than the rest in order to ensure his longevity in power. But the game in Manipur is altogether of a different species. Here the interests of the empire, culture, demography and territory are not involved from the collective angle as they were during the Napoleonic era. The interests of the state and the interests of the people have all been sacrificed at the altar of personal interests.
This personal interest driven character of the principal agents of the province has now landed Manipur in a very precarious condition. We do not have any atmosphere for the innovative minds to emerge in Manipur. In the absence of innovative minds, no innovative action encompassing the people has emerged. This is a fertile ground for groupism, ethnicity, exclusive identity and other zero-sum attitudes to get footholds and multiply. Even more unfortunate is the fact that the protagonists of these exclusionary behaviour are themselves heavily embedded in their core-orientation towards interests of the self. Thus the cycle of action prevailing in the land is one where the future is not ensured for the collective. This is significant because, while the principal agents can eke out their own prosperity in the atmosphere of non-inclusion of the common people, the common people cannot ensure their security for appropriate livelihood and prosperity in such contexts.
Now the question which we need to address is how to alter the behaviour and character of the principal agents. This is a 27 million dollar question. We have to shed the usual habit of tolerance of nonsense behaviour of the principal agents. Since we have two weapons of democratic processes and collective action, time is now for exercising these options with great involvement and intensity. The political option should be exercised to shred the principal agents in the political sector without thinking for the self but by thinking for the collective. The collective action should also be asserted and resorted to shred the nonsensical principal agents in other spheres of social life. Heads must turn to bring a social trend for positive change.