The current crisis over the demand for the implementation of the Inner Line Permit System, among others, has brought to the fore once again the dilemma of who is a leader. It has also yet again brought out the familiar fissures within the Manipur society. The situation did not have to take any ugly turn for this fissure to become visible. The widely differing levels of concerns for the implementation of the ILPS in the hill districts and the valley is evidence enough. No point in any blame-game, for as they say, this is the way the ball bounces, at least just as yet. It would be futile to pretend things are any other way. The effort in the future should then be to bridge this gap, and the quest have to be for a midway house where the divergent interests can meet, and indeed democracy is the perfect mechanism for deciding where this meeting point should be. The biggest lesson for the valley should be, it is time for it to abandon its horrid presumption of being the natural agency for setting the state’s political agenda, or to imagine it holds proprietorial guardianship over the state’s interests. It must take courage to admit to itself that its concerns and aspirations do not have to be shared by all the regions of the state, and that many of its concerns do not spill out too far from the valley. If any issue must be considered as the state’s interest, it must be by consensus of all sections of the population of the entire state. While democracy is undoubtedly a value, it is its structure which guarantees this value. So let everybody take care to stick by this structure.
The word consensus and consent however must come with some important qualifications. The agitation over the ILPS issue has brought this out to the fore too. Why is it that college and university students seldom are seen in these protest rallies, and in their places are school children in uniform? The explanation probably is that the former have independent minds of their own which will not be easily surrendered to any and every calls by those who presume themselves as leaders. This will be quite unlike school children, who can be flocked out of their schools and paraded without difficulty by the “leaders”. There was a discussion evoked on various internet discussion forums over a column which appeared in a newspaper recently, as to the legitimacy or otherwise of grading leadership quality by the praxis they are able to generate. On such a scale it was also implied that V.I. Lenin was greater than Jurgen Habermas. Curiously, the debates seem to apply in this situation as well. To use Habermas’ own formulation, the “lifeworld” of school children and that of university students would be markedly different, therefore the nature of the “public space” associated with them would also be very different. Consequently, the challenges before “leaders” to put their theories into practice (praxis), would be radically different, depending on the nature of the different “lifeworld” they are left to deal with. Lenin led a revolution amongst poor and largely illiterate industrial blue collar workers, just as Mao Tse Tung led his revolution amongst poor, illiterate peasants. Habermas’ “lifeworld” on the other hand is made up of extremely affluent, very well educated, very rich, bankers, academics, technocrats etc, of a very industrialised Western country. He cannot, under the circumstance be expected to lead the kind of revolutions Lenin or Mao led. But Habermas’ interventions on behalf of Greece in the present crisis the country is in, saying in effect that nationhood of a country should be decided by the citizens of a country and not by the diktats of bankers and technocrats from another country, was revolutionary. The praxis he generates cannot thus be by any standard dismissed as slight. Leading school children and leading university students are two different ball games altogether. We wish our revolutions were of the latter category, but alas this has seldom been.