The Crisis Before Manipur

Centre for North East Studies, Academy of Third World Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia and India International Centre is organising a talk on “The Crisis Before Manipur” by , editor of the Imphal Free Press, one of the most articulate and fearless voices to emerge from the North-east.

The talk will be held at the India International Centre, New Delhi from 6:30 pm on February 9, 2011.

Renowned scholar Sanjoy Hazarika and Saifuddin Kitchlew, Chair and Professor, Centre for North East Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia, will be chairing.

Abstract of the talk by Pradip Phanjoubam:
Journalists from the northeast, in my case Manipur, are familiar with the problem of representing issues truthfully in a rather profound way. Assessments of local situations by locals are generally seen as tending towards the subjective and thereby unreliable. The dominant discourse in academic and journalistic writing treats nothing but the empirical and physically verifiable as the standard for identifying and gauging the truth of any claim.
This dilemma is even more acute as the ideologies behind most of the conflicts, at their most fundamental levels, are about secession from India, therefore, anti-national. To write of these movements with sympathy can invite censure, mostly indirect but direct as well. My concern in the past many years have been to try to negotiate with this problem.
How do you tell the story of a deadly, anti-national conflict without foreclosing all subjective, empathetic assessments? My conviction is, the failure of a complete understanding, and thereby diagnosis, of the problems of Manipur and the northeast. The failure has pivoted around the very nature of the essential limitation of the empiricist’s vision – or if I may call it, the bureaucratic approach. To the risk of simplifying overmuch, this approach sees the problem as having everything to do with governance, development, unemployment etc.
Politics too has been, through the years, bought over by this vision. So, there is now hardly any substantive difference between the bureaucratic and political visions. I believe the gravest flaw of this approach to read the situation from tangible indexes only is that it is doomed to miss out on one half of the reality of these conflicts – the subjective, and thereby often intangible reality. My paper will, deal with this issue among others.
About Manipur:
Bordered by Myanmar (Burma) and the states of Nagaland, Assam, and Mizoram; Manupur’s capital is Imphal. The two main physical features of Manipur are the Manipur River valley and the western mountainous region. In 1762 and 1824 Manipur requested British assistance in repelling invasions from Myanmar. The British administered the area in the 1890s. In 1907 a local government took over. A tribal uprising in 1917 led to a new government administered from Assam. In 1947 Manipur acceded to the Indian union. Manipur was ruled as a union territory until it became a state in 1972 after a joint agreement between the All India Congress Committee (AICC), the United Naga Integration Council and the Manipur Pradesh Congress Committee (MPCC). The agreement stated: “It is agreed upon that the Congress Party does not oppose the Naga integration movement and does not consider the Naga integration movement as anti-party, anti-national, anti-state and unconstitutional activity.” The integration mainly between the Meities and the Nagas has remained the major issue of conflict over last many decades.
via isikkim.com