The report that the psychiatry wards in the hospitals in Manipur were generally showing a general upswing of cases even before the tragic current multi-dimensional ethnic conflict is disturbing. This should ring the alarm bells for everybody, in particular the government, but as has become the standard attitude in Manipur, this abnormality too is normalising. Otherwise, it should be clear to all that this phenomenon cannot be just a matter of people opening their eyes to recognize a problem which has always been around. More likely, this probably is a case of new social condition accentuating a problem to make it rise above a threshold to make it very obviously visible.
Whatever the explanation for its coming to the fore, there is every reason to believe this is yet another unseen toll of the general breakdown of institutions, traditional and modern, consequent upon the prolonged state of mindless violence and spiralling lawlessness people are exposed to. In all likelihood, everybody could be exposed in varying degrees to conditions of paranoic dementia without even noticing it. Effort to establish a correlation between the two should be material for meaningful formal academic investigations. Is there a relation between the rising cases of psychiatric patients (including juvenile delinquency, drug and alcohol addiction problems, rise in suicidal tendencies etc.), and the uncertain and unsafe social environment in the state.
There perhaps is also a correlation between this chaotic and intimidating state of affairs and the rising cases of stress related disorders, such as hypertension, migraine, stomach ulcers etc. In all likelihood, the perennial state of mayhem, overbearing decrees and threats of physical injury and elimination are cumulatively becoming a cause for chronic and extremely alarming health issues.
Come to think of it, what would be a day in the life of an average man or woman or even child in the state like? From dawn to dusk, information which get registered in their consciousness are those of violence or their possibilities, tragic aftermaths of murderous aggressions, faces of laments and protests, threats and diktats. Especially in the face of explosion of the unfiltered territory of social media, they literally go to sleep with news and images of violence and disruptive activities. Things are no better on the local cable TV channel or morning newspapers. It is today nothing unrealistic for anybody to expect to be greeted by pictures blood, public discontents and agitations, screaming at them from the pages of their morning newspapers or morning news bulletins.
All these are over and above the myriad, normal and awesome challenges life throw up for everybody everywhere. So average parents of school-going children for instance have not only to fight the clock to pack off their children to school in time and in order, but also desperately scan the pages of the local newspapers to find out whether the day is clear of any bandh or blockade call, lest their children get caught in senseless trouble and danger. Not just adults but even children also are prone to become victims these days. The probability of someone meeting violent death has climbed and today evokes no more than routine public concern.
Thirty or forty years ago, such crimes would have elicited the bewildered response from anybody and everybody that these are horrific and unthinkable. Today even the most naive and trusting grandmother would accept these as Manipur’s beastly new reality.
Once upon a time, the moderating influence of a belief in a benign divine order, as well as those of a deeply institutionalised traditional value system was strong. Back then, it did not always take the law to convince people the basics of what are wrong and right, or what are acceptable behaviours and what are not. Law keeping then was not so impossibly arduous. The venerated space in society that elders once enjoyed, the respect reserved for women and the universal protective instinct for children, have all waned away. It is not just the law which has been turned on its head, but the intuitive values built over the aeons also seemingly are condemned to a similar fate.
Something went wrong somewhere down the line and tragically there have been few or nobody to attempting to arrest the trend. A lot of it probably had to do with the wayward ways of those in charge of the establishment. Official corruption must have been the first blow to shake up pubic faith in social values painstakingly nurtured over generations. Their corrupt ways and the unwarranted abuse of power, often belittling accepted social mores too would have caused the law itself to lose its moral authority over the people, leading them to take it into their own hands.
There has also been, in certain quarters, an intellectual eagerness to destroy established institutions on the pretext that they were degenerate. The fact sheet at this moment shows values of traditional and instinctual jurisprudence, as well as the moral hold of legal institutions of the establishment have all been effectively decimated, but their replacements are either stillborn or else what are offered as replacements are overbearingly authoritarian, undemocratic, hate-driven and obdurately hegemonic.
Editor, Imphal Review of Arts and Politics and author
