In a democracy, the pen should be mightier than the sword. The pen of course is a metaphor of free speech and opinion that the profession of journalism is supposed to represent. Things have changed unrecognizably and the pen metaphor too has seen dramatic changes. It was first replaced by the typewriter, then the computer keyboard, and not the smartphone. But even beyond these shifts in symbols, this truism of freedom of thought and expression is ceasing to have any meaning in Manipur today. The obituary for democracy and democratic values is now being written. What remain are the long terrifying shadow of the gun on one hand, and the power of unearned money, which together have come to freeze everybody and every institution into a silence akin to that of the graveyard.
This was somewhat always expected to be the culmination of the way the conflict in the land has been progressing and the reciprocal lack of accountability in politics. Somewhere in the dialectic between these two unholy agendas, all senses of morality have come to atrophy in spiralling rapidity. For slowly but surely, much of what were once considered to be archetypal sacrosanct spaces of our society are being encroached upon ruthlessly. Crimes which would have been considered unthinkable and unspeakable under any circumstance even a few decades ago, have ceased to be forbidden.
Hostage taking of women and children, humiliating or even killing parents in front of children, attacks at hospitals and places of worship, unabashed gagging of the media, depriving it of its freedom to critically examine any development, be it that of the establishment or the mushrooming civil society organisation, some armed lethally are now commonplace. Equally sad is the fact that nobody even has tears left to cry for a lost world that once was dear to everybody. It must however be said reams and reams of newsprints have been spent lamenting these losses, but those who wield power, either that which flows out of the barrel of the gun or garnered with unaccounted money, are not interested, or at least not moved.
The loss of these unwritten but intuitively understood sacrosanct norms, observed even in war, is especially bitter and ironic in the wake of the campaigns such as by the International Red Cross Society, IRCS, for standardisation of International Humanitarian Law, IHL. It may be recalled the IHL campaign reached Manipur three ago.
Even before the IRCS came into existence, these sacrosanct norms of humanitarian conduct were what distinguished the unique civilisation that took birth in our own soil. Many of the folklores and legends of this place tell of these same civilizational values. For instance, the Meitei’s treatise “Chainarol” which pieced together ancient combat laws which demand compliance to a common understanding of humanitarian behaviour is invaluable evidence of this.
Somewhere down the line, concerns for these civilizational values ceased. But amidst the anarchy the state has known, there have always been some voices in the wilderness calling for the return of these values. Most notably this has been from the places great tradition of performing arts. For instance, Ratan Thiyam’s plays, “Blind Age” dealt with the subject with artistic poignancy. An episode from the Mahabharata in which Ashwathama, driven by hatred and vengeance murders all offspring of the victorious Pandavas to ensure their bloodline meets an abrupt end, is given a new artistic rendering, depicting the tearing agony of a man with conscience, repenting his sin of having trespassed one of humanity’s sacrosanct spaces.
The inevitable question that follows is, has the prolonged conflict situation and endemic corruption in public life in our society erased these same sacrosanct spaces, relapsing the place back into savagery?
The tragedy is, the liberal society seem to have no answer to this overwhelming question. The resort of even supposedly liberal establishments to extraordinary situations hence has often been to illiberal measures. Or else use the shield of these illiberal challenges to steep themselves freely into the addictive sin of Mammon worship.
In very many ways, the reason behind draconian laws and endemic corruption is the bankruptcy of liberal minds to provide liberal answers to extraordinary problems. Had they been successful, the scripts of our present stories probably would have been a lot different. To underscore the point, opposing a draconian strategy on grounds of principle alone is simple. The difficulty is in presenting an alternative, appropriate, liberal strategy, and unless this difficulty is overcome, there cannot be much hope for any substantive change in this sorry predicament. This is the onerous challenge before liberal thinkers. The trouble also is, too many of our self-proclaimed philosophers are so given to fashioning armchair solutions first and then look for the problems. Perhaps it would be a worthwhile exercise to reverse this order sometimes.
Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics and author
