LAND OF THE LIVING DEAD

Few spots on earth can rival the natural beauty
of Manipur valley fenced from all sides by blue
mountains with the Loktak Lake in the middle,
the largest fresh water lake in eastern India. The
inhabitants fondly called this fertile plateau ‘sana
leipak’, a land of gold. Nature here is kind and
endearing. It is pleasantly warm in summer but
never gets hot as ‘hot’ is understood in mainland
India. Winter is mild and sunny, prefixed and
suffixed by smiling autumn and spring. It is
indeed a veritable paradise on earth.
I was born and brought up here. My children too
were born here but brought up abroad across the
continents where my diplomatic assignments
took me. As our family has now spread over
across the globe, none of us live in Manipur
anymore. But we love the land. It bears the
original mark of our identity. It is our cradle, the
original nest, the beginning of our existence.
This land is the only spot on earth that we can
legitimately claim our own. No other place can
take its position. Manipur was our homeland.
Breaking Silence
Since I left D.M.College, Imphal in 1963 and
joined government service in 1967, I hardly had
time to stay in Manipur except for occasional
visits lasting a month or less. My longest stay at
a stretch was seven months in 2003 after my
retirement. My recent visit in 2004 lasted from
August 22-October 12. Every time I visited
Manipur I had to fight within me the temptation
to write what I saw and heard but resisted for
care of hurting the sentiments of my people
whom I love and cherish. This time I changed my
earlier view. My conscience or inner voice told
me that for the love of the land and its people I
must speak out and that every soul that cares
his or her land and people should gather strength
and courage to speak out. For passive silence
and toleration of wrongs amount to tacit
approval of the evils which have been afflicting
the land and its people.
The Killing Field
Manipur of to-day is no longer Manipur that was.
The society has now gone back to the Hobbesian
state of nature where people live in continual
fear and danger of violent death, where life is
solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, where
swords but not words reign supreme and where
they embrace not with loving arms but with
deadly arms of AK-47s. It has become a land of
the living dead where they empty out their anger
and frustration from the barrel of guns.
Whichever side you turn, you see uniformed men
with deathly toys in their hands. On the streets
are government security personnel and those in
the backyard are the so-called Ugs (underground
soldiers). They all wear uniforms and batches
and carry weapons. They co-exist side by side.
They are afraid of each other because they too
are mortals and the toys they carry kill
effectively and mercilessly.
The worst part of it is that much before they kill
you, they kill your freedom first. All these in the
great name of freedom and integrity. One side
kills to defend freedom and integrity of the whole
country and the other side kills to demand and
achieve freedom. One side is armed with Armed
Forces Special Powers Act (AFSPA), a licence to
kill a suspect with immunity from legal
prosecution which is a clear negation of the
fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution.
The danger point in this is that a suspect is not
necessarily the culprit and the obnoxious act
provides a big room for an innocent to suffer
unjustly. As a father has a duty to discipline a
disobedient child but not to kill, the government
has also the same rights and responsibilities but
not to kill except through due process of law.
AFSPA is a negation of that due process and no
amount of articulation in its favour will justify its
existence.
A Failed State
The more realistic issue is: what necessitates
the imposition of such a draconian law as the
AFSPA? Let’s see the picture of Manipur.
According to my observation, Manipur has since
long become a failed State. Corruption of all
kinds has eaten away its foundations and the
machinery therefore inevitably collapsed. Elected
members with little or no vision at all have been
busy making ministry after ministry but never
have the time to run the government. It is a
State where every elected MLA, in a ceaseless
war of position, is vying to become a Minister. If
he is not given a berth in the Cabinet, he rebels
and plots to bring the Ministry down to form
another one. If I remember correctly, at one
point of time the Opposition had a solitary
Congress member namely Mr. Rishang Keishing
as his men left in droves to join a coalition
government. Party affiliation and loyalty has little
or no meaning amongst the foxy Judas Iskariots
whose culture is thriving on outward allegiance
and inner betrayal.
A House of Cards
Only a stable House can provide a stable
government. Unfortunately, Manipur for long has
been having only a house of cards which
collapsed at every knock of power-hungry
politicians. Ministry after Ministry fell like
ninepins and elections after elections held in the
past returned more and more ambitious members
bend on looting the coffers of the State to make
good their election expenses and amass some
for the next elections. I was told time and again
that, on paper, successive ministries had already
undertaken projects after projects, dammed and
bridged every river and nullah worth its name,
terraced every imaginable hillside for cultivation,
provided almost every village some form of
schools with complimentary teaching and
administrative staff, health centers and
dispensaries, electricity and potable water
supply. The list is endless but the reality is
shorter than a hotpant.
Looting the looter
Consequently, the list of people’s frustrations
and complaints is getting longer and longer but
their tempers have become shorter and shorter.
Every imaginable government job carries a heavy
price. The criteria in the employment market is
money. You pay the price, you get the post.
Nothing is possible without money and nothing is
impossible with money. Thousands of educated
unemployed youths who cannot afford to buy
employment either have to go outside the State
to seek employment or to sit idle at home
indulging in drugs or to take up arms and join the
underground outfit. The ongoing famous saying in
Manipur is that if you want to build a good house
and provide economic and physical security to
your family, join the underground. It is a sad
alternative to joining election politics but equally
and immorally lucrative. The new equation is
simple and straightforward: politicians loot and
you loot politicians.
Believe it or not, this is the way the system
operates in Manipur. The Ugs now decide who
will get elected. And once elected, it is the turn
of the elect to support the electors and oblige
their demands and wishes. It is a classic remake
of Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein and the monster
he created. There was a time when a voter
actually and in person cast his or her vote in the
ballot box at the polling booth. Even now, on
paper, a voter still casts his/her vote in the ballot
box in a polling booth but with a difference: now
an unseen hand casts the vote for the highest
bidder through the barrel of a gun. That is the
way our proxy democracy operates in many
areas in Manipur. It’s a complete sham but it
works in its own fashion. You loot the looter
through democratic machinery and share the
booty. Nothing official about it, as the
advertisement goes.
Dead Voters
I was told that the number of houses officially
declared and registered in the villages is much
more than the actual number of houses, and
accordingly the number of voters too. It is
indeed an inflation of a strange kind perhaps not
found anywhere on earth. How could this
happen? Because enumeration in Manipur is a
great political bargaining game. In some areas,
there are more voters than the population. The
dead do not die here for good; they faithfully
surface again at the time of elections. If you sit
with any official and ask his experience on
election duties, he will tell you many juicy
election tales that you will never find even in a
book of fiction. Strange things happen naturally
in this land of deception, a paradise turned into a
blazing inferno by its own people. It certainly
beats Dante’s inferno.