One shudders to think where Manipur is heading. While the present fire of hate filled murderous ethnic violence between Meiteis and Kuki-Zo group of tribes is tragic and frightening, this certainly is not the only threat the people of the state are predicted to face in the not-so-distant future. That is, unless they acknowledge these future dangers, and are willing to live up the challenges they pose and do whatever necessary to change course while there is still time.
The course can change and hopefully it does, but if it doesn’t, it is difficult to imagine what the place would be like in another two generations. For one, the economy is just not generating enough jobs. Those few that are, have been rendered facile by a disproportionately protected and compensated government jobs with the result that everybody today wants a government job and nothing else. Traditionally, non-government professions were beginning to multiply in Manipur, especially in the valley area. Meitei surnames will testify that blacksmiths goldsmiths, mechanics, masons, carpenters, tailors, farmers, horse tenders, poultry keepers and many more were becoming vital services and the backbone of the place’s revenue generation machine.
Today these professionals would sell their professional wares to have enough money to pay the bribes needed to get their children garner even a Grade-4 government job and not be trapped in the professions that their families practiced and honed for generations. As for instance, every time the government advertises for jobs, such as police constables, you would begin to hear of farmsteads and homesteads going for sale. This would not have been so bad if the government was in a position to provide jobs to all job aspirants, but this can hardly be, given that even the 80,000 or so that the government directly employs today have already hit the ceiling of the government’s capacity to sustain, or needs.
There are plenty of redundant employments already, as is loudly visible in any given office where employees are generally seen loafing around or else away from their offices for extended periods. There are also numerous government schools and colleges which have only teachers and staff but no students to teach. This redundancy of workforce can also be gauged if one were to imagine what the scenario would have been if the Manipur government were to be run like a private enterprise, strictly getting the optimum out of each worker and paying as per the contribution of each. In all probability, half as many employees as currently employed would have done a better job.
Just imagine this. Somebody who owns one or two freight trucks or passenger buses would be considered rich by the state’s standard. Why then did the MSRTC which on the average owned 200 such vehicles at any given point, end up an abject failure? This dirge for traditional professions and the reciprocal craze for government jobs are slowly reducing the profile of the state to a dreary monotone, swarming with hierarchies of government servants and government contractors. No prizes for guessing that this disproportionate hunger for government jobs is also a contributing factor for the Meitei wish to be included in the Schedule Tribes list of the Indian constitution.
At some point the question as to what is being served by this gigantic service sector when the social enterprises they are supposed to be serving have been dwarfed or else eliminated, will become unanswerable. How can such an economy ever grow and save itself from being condemned to an eternity of parasitic existence? It is only extreme entrepreneurship which has ensured some professions autonomous of the government continue to pull along amidst these odds.
Manipur must be entering the cataclysmic end of an epoch that so many religions predict. At the end of every epoch, according to these beliefs, the world is consumed by its own violence and misdeeds, and then from the resultant debris and ashes, it rises again in a new incarnation like the sphinx. In Hinduism the notion of Yug says this. But no other religions have it more distinctly than Christianity with its prediction of the Apocalypse and its horsemen with a mission to raze everything of the old world to the ground.
The imagery is arresting and many poets fell for it, including Irish romantic poet WB Yeats who uses it with such gripping power in “The Second Coming”. At the fag end of an epoch, “mere anarchy is loosed upon the earth” and “things fall apart” before civilisation regenerates. Reminiscent in this imagery of death and rebirth, destruction and regeneration, ironically is the notion of revolutionary creativity. The prediction here is, certain institutions and deeply institutionalised social evils (corruption for instance), are beyond reformation and have to be destroyed violently and the foundation of a new society built over their debris.
Krishna’s sermon to Arjuna in the Bhagavad Gita also is very much about this understanding. But this argument can boomerang in the absence of moderation by an interlocutor such as Krishna in the Gita, and idea of revolutionary creativity can begin to mean only destruction without creation.
In the present time, a vital cord has snapped in our society and it is losing its sanity. A society is able to keep on the tract of sanity precisely because human behaviour is not grossly inscrutable and unpredictable. Hence, we know for instance murders do not happen without tangible reason or motive. Even if a single flicker of sanity is left in a society, we also by and large have faith that even in the darkest hours of the most bitter conflicts, there would still remain certain sacred spaces which everybody would leave unharmed and untouched.
Manipur seems have lost this sanity for three months, and there is no certainty that it is regaining this sanity. The sacred civilizational threads which knit our society together giving it a unique and diversely beautiful, bountiful, identity is no longer distinct. Nobody can be sure if anything is safe. It is almost a deja vu of a past era when you are scared to open the morning papers lest you are greeted with news of blood and gore.
This is no doubt a nightmare we are living in on practically every front. The most immediate of these of course is the unprecedented ethnic violence we are witnessing today between the Meiteis and the Kuki-Zo group of tribes. This is the first fire to be doused and then dialogues initiated for all stakeholders to begin thrashing out a way forward for all where every hear each other out patiently and sincerely and on consensus work out a solution which leaves nobody as loser and on the other hand where everybody stands to gain. But beyond this immediate onerous challenge, there are many more social time bombs ticking and they have also to be defused for our society to remain afloat, capable of keeping up with the pace the rest of the world is advancing. We have to remind ourselves that time and tide wait for no man, and the right time to wake up is now. From the ashes of destruction and hopelessness we are now in, let us begin working to ensure we will all rise together again like the proverbial phoenix to attain greater heights than we ever have reached so far.
Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics and author
