Damudor Arambam’s essay “When Representation Crosses the Line” arrives as a necessary provocation in a moment of deep crisis. It scrutinizes the role of Bimol Akoijam, “a scholar turned-parliamentarian”, accusing him of blurring the lines between institutional dissent and revolutionary struggle. It laments the silence of intellectuals and demands moral courage in confronting the Indian state. For this, the essay deserves appreciation.
Yet, it falters by casting the insurgency of the past as an untarnished moral horizon while failing to account for its ideological betrayal, its descent into ethno-nationalist brokerage, and its loss of egalitarian vision. In this, Arambam reproduces what we must now outgrow: the
binary of insurgency vs. parliamentary politics, which no longer captures the historical, ethical, or strategic possibilities of our time.
The early years of insurgency in Manipur were filled with revolutionary proclamations.
Almost every major armed group claimed allegiance to Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. There was once a dream of building a classless society, of overthrowing Indian colonialism while some organizations still claim to revive the indigenous feudalism. But the
former dream has decayed. What we see today are militarized structures of control, acting more like state proxies, ethnic militias, or racketeering machines than organs of revolutionary transformation.
Today, these groups parade ethnonationalist ideology as revolutionary, erasing the material basis of struggle and replacing it with identity warfare, clan loyalty, and sectarian violence.
The slogans of egalitarianism have vanished; what remains is territorial obsession, control of trade routes, and taxation without responsibility. Most troubling of all, many of these actors now function as the informal police of the very state they once swore to dismantle. They manage the moral economy of fear, suppress dissent, police public opinion, and reproduce patriarchal, classist, sexist, and conservative values under the guise of “national unity.”
In this context, Arambam’s lament for lost revolutionary purity rings hollow because there is no purity left to reclaim. The revolutionary project has not just been suppressed it has been compromised from within. In other words, today’s so-called revolutionaries are not
vanguards of a future society. They are remnants of a feudal hangover. They operate as petty bourgeois brokers, lobbying state institutions within the folds of a neoliberal capitalist economy. Their revolution has become spectacle. Their politics, a brand.
On the other hand, Bimol Akoijam’s performance of resistance within Parliament, a space designed to absorb, neutralize, and re-legitimize dissent cannot be mistaken for rupture. The Indian Parliament is not a terrain for revolutionary politics; it is a mausoleum for the
appearance of democracy.
Akoijam’s symbolic defiance,which is his refusal to “take orders from Delhi,” his invocation of Ibobi’s satirical separatist remark, may excite some, but these are gestures within the grammar of state power. They do not threaten the system; they decorate it. At best, his
presence offers a flicker of truth within an empire of lies. At worst, it individualizes resistance, pacifies youth anger, and rebrands co-option as courage. The idea that dissent from within can transform structures is a fantasy sold to every generation. But we have seen
this fantasy play out. It ends not in revolution but in careerism. Resistance must refuse cooption, not rebrand it.
The tragedy of our time is that both the outdated and ideologically bankrupt armed organizations and the parliamentary mic have betrayed us.
The insurgent movements promised classless revolution, but brought patriarchal command, ethnic chauvinism, and private racketeering.
The institutional dissenter promises voice and representation, but delivers disillusionment, performative nationalism, and a return to elite politics.
This dual betrayal has left the people and especially the youth in a mental disarray, a spiritual confusion. They are told to believe in leaders who either become landlords or parliamentarians. The mass is betrayed from above, and abandoned from below.
The current conjuncture in Manipur and across the world calls not for a return to the old blueprints, but for the invention of a new kind of revolution! So, if we are to imagine liberation a new, we must move beyond both the decaying insurgency and the seduction of parliamentary reform. We must ask: what forms of solidarity, organization, and critique are possible in the ruins of both?
We shouldn’t be the inheritors of the old slogans, nor the believers in institutional reform. We are the children of broken promises, of empty stomachs and surveillance dreams. We should demand a new language, one not spoken in the tongues of ideologically bankrupt parties or MPs, but murmured in the kitchens, protest streets, and scorched fields where people have long lived outside the fiction of statehood. A new vision, a new insurgency without uniforms, flags, or high commands.
This revolution must be “Horizontal” where no leader, no army, no hero, no saviour can substitute the collective will of the people.
“Non-identitarian”, not only because we erase our histories or identities, but because we refuse to weaponize them against each other. We seek true freedom and radical equality across difference; not dominance of one community over another, not Meitei supremacy, not
Kuki supremacy, not anyone’s supremacy. The ethnic wars waged in the name of liberation should be rejected at all cost.
“Feminist and anti-feudal”, as no revolution is worth if it reproduces the very forms of control it seeks to destroy i.e., patriarchy, feudal oppression, hierarchy.
We should not ask for inclusion nor representation. Not even an autonomy in its old nationalist forms. We should build it outside the state, without asking for permission, without entering its offices. Not just through slogans and speeches but from every household, kitchen, workplace and through mutual aid creating networks of care and resistance.
This is not utopia but the politics of refusal and creation, grounded in the pain of the present and the memory of betrayal.
To the vanguardist, we say, “your revolution is not ours. You lost your way when you became state actors in revolutionary disguise”.
To the parliamentarians, we say “your representation is not ours. You may speak in our name, but not from our position.”
To both, we say “we refuse to inherit defeat.”
We must learn from the Zapatistas and Rojava as these struggles teach us to not just take over the state but to outgrow it.
We should build a “Mass imagination” in rewriting memory, desire, and solidarity in ways that resist both the state and the nostalgic insurgencies. What we must cultivate instead is a collective insurgency of minds, bodies, and solidarities that refuse to fit into the nation-state’s scripts. The state can kill a movement. It cannot kill a culture of resistance rooted in the everyday.
We declare an epistemic strike, a refusal to think, live, and speak in the language of the state. We are not looking for another hero, another leader, another saviour. Let us be clear that there will be no saviour, no Bimol, no underground leader, no academics with footnotes. The
saviour complex is a disease we must bury with the bureaucracies it sustains.
It is time that we build something from below, from the ruins, from the whispers; a revolution that cannot be shot, seduced, or silenced.
We should not raise our fists only to be seen but plant the seeds of a new revolution underground. When they rise, they will not ask for permission, they will not forget, nor will they forgive. Not a line crossed. A line broken, burned, and redrawn entirely.
