On February 13, Article 356 of the Constitution was invoked and Manipur came under President’s Rule, PR, making way for the President of India to take over charge of all administrative and legislative functions of the state from the state’s Council of Ministers. The state Assembly however is not dissolved and instead kept in ‘animated suspension’, indicating that rather than fresh election to the Assembly after PR, the current ruling Bhartiya Janata Party, BJP, legislators are being given time to tide over their differences to resume power.
For 20 long months of lawless anarchy in the state ever since communal mayhem descended on it on May 3, 2023, the Union government did not consider this emergency resort despite demands for it from many quarters. Why then is it doing so now? Obviously, the primary consideration is still not the anarchy but some other.
One of these is technical. Article 174 of the Constitution requires that the space between two state Assembly sessions be not more than six months, and this deadline expired on February 12. The deadline had closed in because the state skipped its Winter Session, and therefore Budget Session was planned to begin on February 10, two days ahead of this deadline.
However, on February 9 afternoon, the then chief minister, N. Biren Singh, resigned, probably compelled by BJP central leadership in order to avoid a possible split in the BJP legislative party as dissidence within against Singh was getting intense. The opposition Congress was poised to move a no confidence motion against the government, and it was feared that dissenting ruling MLAs were ready to risk disqualification to support the motion if Singh remained as chief minister.
Immediately after accepting Singh’s resignation, Manipur Governor, Ajay Kumar Bhalla, for unexplained reasons, declared the summoned Assembly session scheduled to begin the next day, “null and void”, probably not briefed of the February 12 deadline. He also probably thought a new chief minister could take charge promptly and the Assembly resummoned. However, a bitter struggle between Singh loyalists and dissidents on who should succeed Singh made this impossible.
The state, already a step into a Constitutional limbo by then, with only a caretaker government and a lapsed Assembly session deadline had little other way out than PR to take over. On February 13, this was done though without dissolving the Assembly.
According to a Ministry of Home Affairs reply to an online RTI application in 2016, Manipur had come under PR 10 times by then, therefore the current would be the 11th, making it one of the most prone states to this extreme measure. Among many others, this also reflects the fractured nature of its political landscape, and this is not surprising given its ethnic diversity.
Manipur has 33 recognized Scheduled Tribes, most falling into the Naga and Kuki (now Kuki-Zo) groupings. These are besides the majority Meiteis (and Pangals or Meitei Muslims) who are considered non-tribals. There are also several other non-tribal communities such as Nepalis, Punjabis, Tamils, Marwaris etc., constituting a substantive percentage of the state’s projected population of about 3 million. Unfortunately, the latter are virtually invisible and taken for granted as factors in most analyses of power equations in the state.
Adding to this complication is what has been termed as politics of populism. A 2024 book, Righteous Demagogues: Populist Politics in South Asia and Beyond, jointly authored by Adnan A. Naseemullah and Pradeep K. Chhibber, provides many insights even into the problems unfolding on micro canvases such as Manipur. A brief sketch of their proposition will therefore be helpful.
The authors start with the Google dictionary definition of political populism, which is: “a political approach that strives to appeal to ordinary people who feel that their concerns are disregarded by established elite groups”. What is interesting and relevant are the three broad categories of political populism that the authors profile.
The first is “Reordering” populism, and its representation is broad not sectarian. Its appeal is the idea of restructuring the moral order, such as by championing, or else using, issues like poverty uplift, farmer’s rights etc., to further political gains. Politician who successfully push such agendas and emerge as leaders also tend to be majoritarian and autocratic.
The second is “Additive” populism, and in this would fall campaigns for inclusion by those excluded. A political movement for instance by Nepalis for inclusion in the larger scheme of Manipur political establishment would fit this category. These seek realignment not radical restructuring.
The third is what the authors call “Quotidian” populism. These popularist politicians seek to create their exclusive constituencies, and then to have the exclusivity of their constituencies preserved for their vested ends. They are partisan and their popularist political interest is to keep societies polarised.
Quite obviously, in the hotly contested political arena of Manipur, there are players of all these different brands of political populism. Followers of politics of the state in the wake of the state’s nearly two-year-old ethnic strife between two of the state’s major communities, Meiteis and Kuki-Zos would have also noticed this.
This fight should have remained between the Government of Manipur, then headed by Biren Singh, and the Kuki-Zo tribes, considering the chief reasons for all the animus were Singh’s drive against forest encroachers, poppy cultivation and illegal migration, pursued rather insensitively and with accusatory populist fanfare that would have been dehumanising and humiliating for those at the receiving end.
Unfortunately, politics of populism of Singh as well as well as his elite adversaries on the other side of the fence, competitively built waves of ethnic paranoia in their respective constituencies for their brands of politics to ride on, ensuring in the process that the hostilities transformed into communal enmity.
The current spell of PR is unlikely to last long and probably a new BJP government will take charge sooner than later. Be it for such a government or continued PR, the challenges ahead are far from simple. On consideration of the irridenta reality, population movements across the international border must continue to be allowed but not unaccounted, just as drive against poppy cultivation or forest encroachment must continue, though sensibly and sensitively.
But above all, the effort must be for an end to the senseless communal hostilities. In the long run, politics must shed populism and instead be consensual, shaped by the principle that promoting the greater common good guarantees the enlightened self-interest of all. Manipur’s political history since it became a full-fledge state in 1972 has evidences of this character, and anybody from any community can emerge as chief minister depending solely on calibre.
This article was first published under a different headline in The Hindu. The original can be read HERE
Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics and author
