To say Manipur’s problems are intractable would be an understatement. There are too many of them, a great many of which work at cross purposes, pulling the cart in different directions, ensuring in the end nothing moves.
Perhaps the divide is inevitable, considering the ethnic diversity, but more importantly, the different political economy each was in before the advent of the modern. The settled agriculturists, the shift cultivators, the hunter gatherers, the nomadic foragers and communities amongst whom the economy and professions have begun to diversify and take roots in the secondary sector, beyond the traditional and primary, are hardly likely to have the same outlook to land and governance.
Before the advent of the modern, Manipur was all of these wrapped into one, and indeed would have counted as a typical Zomian landscape that James Scott sketched in his important book, “Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchic History of Upland South East Asia”. Scott predicts the days of Zomia is definitely numbered, implying the ultimate and inevitable replacement of this quaint and anachronistic human-scape with that the modern. If this foreboding is accurate, perhaps the turmoil places like Manipur are going through is the inevitable trauma of such a transition.
For the moment, any form of a civic identity of its citizenry seems destined to remain elusive in Manipur. Everybody, on the other hand is too stuck up with their perceived ethnic identities defined presumably and exclusive by ethnic lineages and traditions alone. Each therefore continues to choose to remain in the respective seclusion of their individual boxes, rendering any larger civic agenda redundant.
By its very definition, the civic identity would have to be secular. In the context of places like Manipur, we are of the opinion that secularism should be less about separating religion from politics, but more about separating ethnicity from politics.
In other words, to paraphrase and adopt respected historian Romila Thapar’s definition of secularism, in our context it should be about giving our civic citizenship primacy over our ethnic identities in matters of routine administrative outlooks, or “governmentality” to borrow the notion made famous by Foucault. Just as religion is expected to remain in private spheres of individual citizens in a secular democratic polity, ethnicity too must. The civic and public agenda of governance thereafter must rest on issues like administrative convenience and optimisation of resource utilisation etc.
After witnessing all that has been happening in Manipur, we are inclined to believe maybe this degree of uniformity through a constitutional definition of citizenship and rights, is vital for any project to construct a secular polity to succeed.
The trouble in Manipur today is, too may are fixated on reading too much between the lines that they have become extremely prone to miss out what are actually in print. In a secular democracy, laws are made by a set of people but these law makers do not get to interpret the law they make when it comes to their application, unlike say in a feudatory or dictatorship. The interpretation is done by another set of independent institution called the judiciary, whose mandate is to weigh any piece of legislation against the fundamental tenets of the constitution and best practices in international law. If the application of any law is found by the judiciary s contravening any of the fundamental principles of the constitution, such an application or interpretation of the law will be deemed to be ultra vires and disallowed.
We also know that the appellate structure of the Indian judiciary extends right up to the Supreme Court and therefore even an individual citizen can challenge the false application or interpretation of any law via even the country’s highest court. What we learned by rote in school that democracy is safer than any other known polity, is precisely because of this separation of legislature, judiciary and executive. To doubt this would be to ask for anarchy.
Two other things need to be noted. First, as Friedrich Angels wrote in “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State”, a work based largely on the research findings of anthropologist H Morgan, the State is a mechanism for surplus management. State formation therefore happens where a surplus economy emerges.
It is no surprise that state formation is generally predicated by an agricultural revolution which makes a society not only food secure but also frees many from food production work to foray into other economic activities, making the economy of the community progressively more complex. This ultimately leads to the need for a centralised bureaucracy to manage the economy and leads to the evolution of the state.
This implies that communities living on subsistent hunting and foraging economy will have no need for the state, and indeed the friction between state bearing and non-state bearing populations is what James Scott’s “Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchic History of Upland South East Asia” studies.
States also are run on taxes collected from its citizens. The fund raised from these taxes then are used to provided different services to the tax payers. In this sense, the state is a result of a social contract between those running the state and its citizens, as classical European thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, propounded.
This logic is often overridden especially in the case of Northeast states where the funds made available to each state is not always proportionate to the taxes its citizens pay. In the decades that have gone by, people generally have forgotten of this relationship between taxes they pay (or not pay) and the annual funds in the hands of their state. Instead they have begun to see the latter as an automatic entitlement. This is also one big problem.
The proliferation of the demands for separate states and administrations therefore have nothing to do with alternate models for tax management, but of the desire for separate begging bowls. Isn’t it time yet for issues such as these to become the focus of our intellectual deliberations.
The second thought of importance is the idea of borders. In this, we have to realise that the modern state is essentially the Westphalian State that Europe agreed upon in 1648 ending, as Mohammed Ayoob wrote, four centuries of civil unrest and conflict, the most devastating of which was in the last 30 years before these treaties were signed because of the divisions caused in the Christian world after Martin Luther’s Reformist Movement.
Loyalties of the adherents to the Roman Church or Protestants Church tended to be with their religions and not the countries they belonged to, just as the political loyalties of ethnic and linguistic communities tended to remain beyond national boundaries resulting in messy conflict scenarios. It should not be difficult for those of us in the Northeast to imagine what this must have been like.
The Treaties of Westphalia’s chief thrust is to end this chaos. It made national boundaries the sole determinant of sovereignty so that regardless of what religion or ethnicity, if a person is within the national territory of any particular state, the person would be a citizen of that state, entitled to equal rights as per the state’s constitution. Hence a Frenchman in Belgium would be a Belgian citizen, just as German in Italy would be an Italian citizen etc.
We do not have to invent the wheel all over again. We have the example of how Europe settled this messy issue and we can use their experience to avoid another four centuries of traumatic conflict before realising, just as Europe did, that there is no alternative than for people within the same integral geographical boundaries to accommodate and adjust to each other consensually.
Not just Europe, but the rest of the world has inherited the Westphalian State which is what the modern state is. We have no choice but to accept this reality at least until an alternate model of the state comes about. But this alternative, we all know belongs to the utopian world such as the one eulogised by the late John Lenon of the Beatles in his timeless song “Imagine”.
Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics and author
