By Amar Yumnam
The change is salient `“ one may enter into a mall, a cinema hall, attend a meeting in a government office, or just get into a restaurant. Cool, just be patient; I am definitely not talking of my birthplace Manipur. I am rather talking of Delhi of late. The recent changes happening in Delhi possess both ethical and cultural components, and for these they are absolutely lovely. When I talk of change, I do mean it in the positive sense of the social milieu getting better without multiplying the strangeness of both process and outcomes. In other words, we now see signs of both social contextualisation and moving forward happening in Delhi; this is visible in both the government and the market sector.
Here one would certainly be concerned as to what exactly is the scenario back home in Manipur. Well, historically Manipur is replete with experiences of change (more of the negative one, and less of the positive) and absence of change; I am more familiar of post-1949 Manipur. The changes happening have confined more or less in the valley, and the absence of change has been the fortune of the mountains of Manipur. The changes happening in the valley have been mostly material without ethical and cultural components; the changes are non-contextualised and non-rooted. These have resulted mostly in multiplication of corruption and rise of nepotism. The absence of changes in the mountains of Manipur has been even more painful for the common people. First, the mountains of Manipur are yet to experience the reality of democratic governance. This absence of governance has had a very deleterious effect on the access to services and market, and consequently on the scope for social and individual enhancement. This absence of governance or rather the notion of nation state as still inexperienced, the vacuum has long been occupied by non-state forces challenging the formal state. But very unfortunately for the common people, these non-state forces have not found time to articulate and attend to the developmental needs of the mountain population besides political mobilisation.
In these circumstances it is naturally expected that the people do long for a break from whatever developmental path they have experienced in the province. In the valley, the people do want a kind of governance structure and social atmosphere where there will be equal `“equal across ethnicity and economic status- scope for participation in whatever opportunities available for advancement in well-being and based on efforts, quality and merit. This is because the long jeopardy caused to genuine efforts and genuine quality has dampened social cohesion, social strength and deepened inter-generational transmission of poverty. The consequence is the rise to majority of the numbers experiencing unhappiness under the prevailing character of governance. This number has not had the capability to influence the democratic outcomes for the very democracy prevailing is non-contextualised, and the clubs exercising state-power are too powerful. In the case of the mountains, the people have been made to bear with the twin squeeze of absence of state-governance on one hand, and the violent impositions of all hues from the non-state forces on the other. These have forced the common people to work ever harder in a context of non-delivery of modernisation elements by the state and the extractions of the non-state forces. In the mountains, the elites on both state and non-state sides have been so strongly pre-occupied with rent-extraction from all sides without in any way bothering to attend to the needs of the common people. The state elites find the existence of the violent non-state elites a convenient excuse to concentrate on personal aggrandisement. The non-state and violent elites too apply the same logic vice versa. Thus the common people are forever caught in a stationary situation to struggle for their livelihood. This is why inter alia we see absolute degradation of forests, worsening of poverty, deep gender challenges and other serious development burdens in the mountain areas of Manipur.
Whatever the case, we must emphasise that the prevailing socio-economic milieu is unsustainable in both the geographic divisions of Manipur. Change must happen. The question arises who would spearhead the changes. There is some deep introspection required here about the contextual challenges in Manipur. It would be too much if we expect that the provincial government with the prevailing characters would be able to rise to the occasion. However, there is also the constitutional as well as contextual reality that it cannot be ignored either. This is where we expect certain impositions from the central government on the provincial government on important issues relating to the livelihood and advance opportunities of the common people. The experience of China during the mid-1990s is interesting in this regard. In order to usher into the various market-oriented reforms, the centre had to prevail upon many provinces in big decisions. It was as Henry M. Paulson, Jr., former Secretary of the Treasury of the USA has put in his just-published book Dealing With China: `reform efforts led initially to more central control, not less.`
What we need in Manipur is contextualisation of democracy by going beyond the issues of state. In other words, there is a fundamentality of the need for necessarily incorporating the civil society in conceptualising the notion of state in Manipur. Here we may recall the late-1980s`™ perception of civil society in Eastern Europe: `the notion that democratization should be broadly conceptualized in terms of civil society instead of aspects of the state, and in terms of trans-national and international interdependencies instead of domestic forces alone. Hence, in one way or another, the transitions to democracy inaugurated after 1989 were presented as the triumph of civil society. For leading democratic intellectuals such as Michnik in Poland and Havel in Czechoslovakia, civil society was a term with almost magic powers: it combined a political project of freedom, an economic project of growth, a form of international insertion and the basis for building democratic institutions. In other words, there appeared to be no inherent contradiction between finding and building democracy through civil society and institutionalizing it formally, between growth through marketization and civil and social rights.` But we have a very challenging scenario in Manipur in the sense that the civil society perceptions in the valley are not in convergence with those prevailing in the mountains in most cases. The atmosphere of governance oriented towards rent-seeking over decades have led the articulations to mostly based on contradictions of each other instead of evolving towards a shared conviction. This is where the strong intervention from the Centre for establishing democracy, democratic participation, democratisation of opportunities for individual advancements and institution building is called for. In any case, we cannot afford the repetition of the democratisation experience with civil society perspectives: `because civil society organizations were expressly political and addressed issues concerned with `high`™ politics and the form of the state, environmental, ethnic and gender problems were largely ignored.` Further, `while civil society as “democracy” does provide an alternative to state socialism, the existence of the necessary preconditions for civil society `“ based on the autonomous individual (freed from communal identities) as moral agent `“ cannot be taken for granted . . . It is not the apotheosis of the individual that vitiates the civil (and communal) pole of civil society but the continued existence of strong ethnic and group solidarities which have continually thwarted the very emergence of those legal, economic and moral individual identities upon which civil society is envisioned.`
While the imperative for change is all the more in the mountains of Manipur, the challenge and the fear for undesirable outcomes are all the more here as well. Whatever reform which might come in place should conform, at least for the mountain areas, to the second principle of justice of John Rawls which states: `Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are both: (a) to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged, consistent with the just saving principle, and (b) attached to offices and positions open to all under conditions of fair equality of opportunity.` But, with the prevailing realities, there is little if any likelihood of any political reform satisfying this Second Principle of Rawls, and instead it may just worsen the condition of the `least advantaged` in the mountain villages. This invites the question as to how to avoid such an outcome. This can be done only by allowing the mountain population to emerge as `autonomous individuals`. The global development experience tells us that evolving individual property rights regime has been the foundation for emergence of autonomous individuals. There is both urgency and pre-requisite for completing the cadastral surveys in the mountain areas of Manipur in the interest of the common people in general and the `least advantaged` in particular.