The frustrating fatalism that reigns in Manipur

It is depressing that in Manipur, freight trucks managing to reach the state capital with heavy escorts has once again become material for front page news. Likewise, people await announcements in the newspapers of gas stations where the day’s rationed sales of diesel and petrol would take place so that they are not left too far behind in the miles-long queues.

A decade ago, when the state government chose to implement the fifth Pay Commission recommendations for its employees without first getting the concurrence of the central government or checking its bank balance, in the process going totally broke, it was the status of the state government’s cash balance with the Reserve Bank of India which made headline news.

The RBI releasing funds for the state at the time had then come to be awaited with thirst by everybody, for it meant release of government salaries, sometimes after as much as six months at a time. Anybody older than 15 would remember what difficult times those were, with the markets acquiring a cadaveric hue, considering the biggest source for its liquidity was — and still is — the purchasing power of salaried government employees as the private sector has still not managed to grow out of its infancy. As always, the poor who had little or no credit worth, were the hardest hit.

Such things can only happen in Manipur. Here events and things, which ought to be drearily normal and routine can suddenly become abnormal, thus acquiring news value, and conversely, what would be considered abnormal anywhere in the world can also become normal and everyday reality.

Now that the state is managing to maintain a healthier bank balance with the RBI and at least salaries for government employees are no longer the unbearable burden that it once was, there are other ordinary things that are acquiring a grotesque visage.

Essential commodities are beginning to disappear from shop shelves, so have the petrol pumps dripped dry, prices are skyrocketing with an LPG cylinder costing Rs2,000. The twin economic blockade along the state’s lifelines by those demanding as well as opposing the proposed SADAR (Special Area Demarcated as Autonomous Region) hill district has come to upset life in the state, bringing back the unfortunate reality of routine events turning into nightmares.

For the uninitiated, the SADAR Hills is a subdivision of the predominantly Naga tribes-dominated Senapati district, but in this particular subdivision the dominant population are the Kuki tribes.

The Kukis now want SADAR Hills to be separated from the Senapati district as a full-fledged district, and they have imposed a blockade on Manipur’s lifelines to arm twist the government. The Nagas oppose the proposed district, claiming that the area is part of the Naga ancestral homeland and have also imposed a blockade to remind the government what they can do if it gives in to the Kuki demand. In the absence of any government move to break the impasse, the blockade which began on August 1 is now 73 days old.

Truck movement along the highways have been transformed into heroic and thereby headline material. With the state government doing precious little and the Union government not at all interested in intervening, it is anybody’s guess how much more pathetic the situation will get, or if the worsening intercommunity relations can blow out of control into open violence?

But if the routine can become abnormal in Manipur, so can many shockingly abnormal events also get reduced to the mundane. Visitors to the state are bewildered at how ordinary citizens tolerate so many overwhelming but avoidable odds in daily life.

This is a state where electric power for domestic consumption is available for four hours a day, piped municipal water is available for an hour on alternate days, and black toppings on city and country roads get washed away every monsoon.

Yet everybody seems to have come to accept this as normal in a frustratingly fatalistic way. No accountability is ever fixed by the government for all these failures and equally, no accountability is ever sought by the public either. The notion of citizen’s rights has been so badly skewed that today only the crassest violations seem to qualify to be called infringements. So while the Armed Forces Special Powers Act is seen as the overbearing state breathing down neck of ordinary men and women, health hazards posed by scarcity of safe drinking water or the omnipresent cloud of dust hanging above the roads are seen as nothing to be so upset about.

The truth is the threshold of concern has been pushed up extremely high by decades of misgovernance and violence that only extremely unnatural deaths and injuries are seen as constituting threats to life and dignity. This raised threshold has resulted in an induced blindness to a whole range of more nuanced atrocities.

— The writer is editor, Imphal Free Press