Continuity And Change

‘Shops in Imphal stay open later than usual. Some claim that this is an improvement’

By Patricia Mukhim

It was a pleasant surprise to be escorted to the swanky new Classic Hotel at Imphal, a few meters away from the Kangla Fort. The hotel is spick and span and serves an eclectic range of fruits for breakfast, including the exotic dragon fruit that you are unlikely to see anywhere else except in the hotels of Southeast Asia. Located in one of the cleaner surroundings of Imphal and close to the city’s premier business and commercial hub and office complexes, the Classic is something Imphal can be proud of. But does this suggest that things are slowly limping back to normal? That’s a difficult riddle to even attempt an answer to.

The state government recently organized a one-day seminar on Peace Dividends in this hotel. The ambience was in consonance with the theme. You can’t be talking peace in a place where you are likely to have to quarrel with the waiters and are in a state of continuous torment about the quality of room service. I believe the hotel belongs to a doctor who also owns one of the most reliable diagnostic centres in Manipur. This is quite an impressive combination.

Foreboding

This time one also noticed that the shops in Imphal stayed open later than usual. Some claim that this is an improvement. But as a regular visitor to Imphal you cannot miss the sense of foreboding. It is almost as if people are trying to defy something or someone in a spirit of foolhardiness born out of desperation. Every Manipuri knows that things can explode or implode and that the hopes they had built would turn to ashes. Yet they move about with a sense of purpose. You cannot but admire their “never-say-die” attitude. I know this sounds like an episodic narrative that is likely to be scorned by those who know better. But this is the liberty that a commentator enjoys. At the moment people are aware of the quit notice served by the Revolutionary Peoples’ Front (RPF), the political wing of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on all non-Manipuri's who had come to the state after 1949, asking them to leave Manipur by May 31. The PLA is ruthless and usually means what it says. Knowledgeable sources say the PLA is the only group which is allegedly funded by the Chinese. They claim that if any militant group in the region has the makings of a Maoist movement then the PLA definitely has those moorings.

The RPF has directed transporters not to bring in non-Manipuri's and also told the local people not to rent out rooms or sell land to them. Above all, it warns the locals not to allow non-Manipuri's to head any business organization in the state. The non-Manipuri's have written to the Prime Minister seeking his intervention in this matter. They reminded him that in the past five years at least 32 non-Manipuri's, particularly those from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh who run small business establishments, have been mercilessly gunned down. Militants have also gone on a door-to-door search in some areas and threatened people to leave or face bullets.

Wrong-footed

There is today a sense of panic among the non-Manipuri residents and while many wonder how they can leave behind everything they have built over the years, others have taken the soft option and left after disposing off their businesses in a distress sale.

The seminar on Peace Dividends, therefore, seemed a bit incongruous, conducted as it was under the shadow of this impending threat. Yet nothing much was spoken about this attempt at ethnic cleansing either by the local participants or by security forces, except a government official mentioning it in his presentation. But he, too, dwelt more on the diminishing returns of bandhs that are called by sundry organisations on the flimsiest of pretexts. The seminar pointed to the huge losses to the state exchequer every day a bandh is called. Somehow, you get the feeling that the Meiteis are deeply frustrated by the bandh calls on National Highway 39 that passes through Naga-inhabited areas.

Prof. Gangumei Kamei, a historian who retired from Manipur University, advanced his arguments that people are driven to the last resort of calling a bandh because the government is otherwise insensitive to their pleas. Manipur director-general of police Joykumar Singh and other senior bureaucrats, however, wondered why citizens do not take their grievances to the deputy commissioner or the superintendent of police before they insist on marching to the chief minister’s office.

The problem with all babus (and I include policemen in this category) is that by training they imbibe an arrogance which automatically alienates them from the people. Their body language, the tone and tenor of their voices, all suggest that they are the rulers while the citizen or the person (not man) on the street are to be governed in a way that only they know how. Participatory governance, the sine qua non of good governance in a democracy, is a new entrant into the dictionary of the bureaucracy.

Bureaucrat bane

Most bureaucrats consider it a waste of time to listen to people so how can they be expected to engage in participatory planning which are pre-requisites for schemes like the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) and the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM)? What the bureaucrats would prefer to do is to outsource the entire responsibility to the village headman who in turn gives job cards to people and pays them Rs 40 out of Rs 100 for work not done. There is so little supervision on the NREGS that observant people who see this scheme being frittered away, warn that it is only a matter of time before the Red Corridor extends to this part of the world. Also, because the number of poor people slipping further down the poverty line each year is growing in absolute numbers in this region.

This is not to say that there are no good or responsive babus but their numbers are too few to make a difference in this country. You often wonder whether the Indian Administrative Service ever trains people to walk the last mile in the village or whether it grooms them to scramble for their creature comforts from day one and to order people around in conceited tones. To my mind the huge vacuum in delivery systems can be attributed to the bureaucracy. While talking of Maoism, it is amazing that no one actually holds the bureaucracy responsible for failure in governance.

MPs cutting across party lines while speaking of the Dantewada massacre in Parliament have urged the UPA government to bring in some urgent administrative reforms such as fixed tenures for officers and the police. The propensity of the IAS/IPS to scout and scrounge for Delhi postings has made a mockery of the all-India services because it is evident that their prime aim is to serve themselves.

While Manipur’s dystopia is multi-dimensional, it would be good to start looking for solutions somewhere. Soul-searching from the bureaucracy, the civil society, the security forces who have literally been demonised, the media as an interpreter of Manipur’s maladies and other important stakeholders such as the academia and intelligentsia is an imperative. For too long, people have blamed politicians for the messy affair that Manipur is today. Delhi, too, has received the sharp end of the stick. For a change why not give up the blame game and try the Gandhi exhortation — be the change you want to see.

In the gloom cast by the quit notice, can anyone expect tourists to come in and relax in Imphal?

(The writer can be contacted at patricia17@rediffmail.com)