As much as the state
is being urged to shed excessive militarization in
tackling the issue of terrorism, ‘insurgent
groups’ must also be urged to reorient their
vision of ‘a healthy society’, and most
particularly ‘to respect individual liberties
and human rights’.
One of the major concerns
expressed in private among the civil population these
days in Manipur is about atrocities committed by non-state
actors in the bloody conflict situation, a category
of offences on a steep rise. Kidnapping for ransom,
extortion, intimidation, killing for not honouring
extortion demands and such other offences have become
the state’s staple news today. Is the ‘revolution’
over or has it been hijacked and made petulant by
whimsical, self-centreed interpretations of it? These
are some very pertinent questions, but one that people
dare not ask openly.
One thing is very certain: The ‘revolution’ has ceased to inspire awe, as it once used to. Nobody rushes out any more to pick up underground pamphlets thrown out of speeding vehicles. Instead, the dread is that one or other of the dozen or two underground organisations would ask the media to reproduce verbatim long treatises on their philosophy of the ‘revolution’. Refusal to follow these instructions has had unhealthy consequences. Too much blood has flowed down the rivers and streams of Manipur and the people are fatigued beyond limits.
When the state forces act beyond their official briefs and commit atrocities on the civil population, the public stance is clear, as indeed it should be. All executive organ of the state, including law-enforcing apparatus, are expected to keep by the parameters of the law. If and when they transgress this expectation, public outrage is perfectly legitimate. There can also be no dispute as to the violation of basic human rights by such behaviour when the state commits atrocities on the civil population. But when insurgents commit the same offences, the argument has been that these will have to be treated as a law and order problem for the law keepers to handle. Unlike the law keepers, who are expected not to violate the law, the same cannot be said of those challenging the law of the land.
The limitation of this argument is also becoming increasingly obvious. For one, all insurgent groups claim to be governments with their own laws, courts, administration and army. Under the circumstance, they too cannot be exempted of responsibility of governance and ensuring public order and security. Moreover, when we refer to the law in matters of human rights, we refer not just to the law of the land, or even to international law. At the core, we also mean the law of nature, whereby every human being is entitled to certain fundamental rights—the right to dignified living, for example.
These are the kinds of rights that are being trampled upon in Manipur today by both the law-enforcers as well as the law-breakers. The question then is: Shouldn’t every trespass on this sacred and private territory of the individual citizen be equally treated as human rights violations, regardless of who the violator is—state or non-state actors? By such a yardstick, the guilt of human rights violation will most likely have to be shared equally by the state and the non-state players.
Military in Nature
In Manipur, because of the crassness of issues thrown up by the prevalent conflict situation, discussions on the question of human rights too have not gone much beyond the most obvious exercise of finger-pointing. Understanding human rights violation has been generally concentrated in the area of physical harm and culpable threats to life. Indeed, in these tumultuous times of multifaceted insurrections, we are faced with an emergency; and nobody immersed in such a situation can be expected to look much farther than the immediate. But the onerous responsibility before all, especially our leaders and planners, is to do precisely the opposite and look farther.
It is an unenviable situation. The militaristic nature of the turmoil in Manipur has very naturally evoked very militaristic responses. As a result, it is not just the state that is padding itself up with tough militaristic laws that increasingly takes its toll on civil liberties. A parallel development is happening amongst the non-state players in conflict. Yes, we have a surfeit of draconian laws like the Disturbed Area Act, Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act and National Security Act. But the underground organisations too have been meting out very militaristic decrees and edicts, which are enforced equally brutally, if not more, as the state’s draconian laws.
Hence, the story today is of custodial torture and killings, arrests without memo, and mass scale atrocities in search operations, on the part of the state forces. On the other hand, summary executions after summary trials by underground military courts where the judge and jury are also the prosecutors, extortions as if by right, thought and moral policing, enforcement of dress codes, bans and banishments, intimidation and attacks on the media etc. To make matter worse, even student organisations have assumed the mantle of moral policemen, imposing their own bits of bans and banishments. They have also begun dictating what school curriculum should be and what textbooks school children should be taught.
As expected, the worst casualty has been individual freedom of choice and action. Ironically, it is also the case of turning on its head the pivotal axiom of a democratic society: the inherent superiority of civilian rule and mandate over the military. As a result, nobody can honestly say in Manipur today that the land’s ultimate sovereigns are its civil population, and not the wielders of the guns. This overall sense of civilian insecurity is the emerging reality. But, because it is a cumulative effect of so many aberrations happening at the same time, it is difficult to index it. It is also unlikely to be named specifically as a human right violation. But if this is not an infringement on the individual’s sense of dignified living, it is difficult to see what else can be.
No Rational Discourses
No rational discourse is possible in such an atmosphere of insecurity and lawlessness and indeed very little honest intellectual discourses are happening on any forum. In any discussion on Manipur’s future at this juncture—be it development, culture, capital investment, ethnic tensions, education, trade and commerce, youth unrest or any other area of activity in the state, including the fine art of statecraft—one overwhelming question remains the common denominator: the law and order situation. This question looms over every other issue and, more often than not, its very presence freezes all other discussions, making them redundant.
The rather cynical little parable from the kindergarten books, of the mice community making big plans about their future and suddenly realizing that, before any of their plans can be executed, the cat in the house will have to be belled, comes to mind. As in the case of the mice, discussants on lofty and weighty issues in Manipur today too invariably pass through a similar trauma at the conclusion of every such discussion. All jaws drop, expressions go blank, and the overwhelming question that eliminates the relevance of all other questions becomes, who will bell the cat? The question itself then becomes the answer, and the awful realization is articulated eloquently in just one unspoken word—nobody. Such is the magnitude of the problem, and its effect can be felt and understood fully only by those who live in the state under the shadow of this awesome question.
Casual onlookers and armchair highbrows in distant Delhi and elsewhere, often misunderstand this general silence on the question, and misinterpret it variously, including as a public complicity in the tumult, or vested interest in perpetuating the problem in the land etc. Nothing can be further from the truth. People here yearn more than ever for peace and normalcy, but these are qualities of life that had gone beyond their control for a long time now. The recent spate of kidnapping and killings has made matters worse, and it does seem that a critical point has been reached. The civil society (read as Meira Paibis, the rest being silent spectators) in Manipur is becoming more and more assertive in speaking out its minds even if it means daring to suggest methods of belling the omnipresent cat in their house. But this is not surprising at all, after all, who wouldn’t be tired of living in a perpetual state of chaos? And chaos has been in Manipur for the last couple of decades.
The insurgency movement in Manipur is moving into a new phase and it is tiring out the people. And this fatigue has come about because of a growing alienation from the causes that insurgency represents. Hastening the process is also the mushrooming of insurgent organisations, as well as the openly fascistic leanings of many of them. Authoritarianism may be able to ensure a regimented, military discipline, but when such discipline is allowed to spill outside the boundaries of military organisations, the casualty is the spirit of freedom, which has been the fountainhead of human creativity in free societies through history. Authoritarian diktats, however well intended, also totally undermine the civil society’s intelligence and ability to judge for themselves. While institutional law seeks to arbitrate between different and often overlapping guarantees of freedoms, a diktat is a straitjacket. Having been subjected routinely to these straitjackets, the value of democratic law is growing in the esteem of the people of Manipur.
Undeniably, there was a time when people identified the roots of insurgency in their own anger at a dysfunctional establishment, and the frustration in searching for a foothold in a radically new historical predicament. Insurgency then was indeed to a significant extent their own ‘mailed fist’, in the words of Frantz Fanon, to deliver their anger at the establishment. This is increasingly ceasing to be the case today, primarily caused by the numerous shifts that have occurred even in the very definitions of the most fundamental paradigms of identity, freedom and even nationhood. The writing on the wall today tells of an unmistakable thirst for peace and reconciliation. Those who think and feel for the people cannot ignore this pulse in the arteries of Manipur.
Terrible Beauty
The Irish poet, Y.B. Yeats, who saw some of the worst periods of Irish insurrection, described insurgency as a ‘terrible beauty’. He watched with alarm and awe as young men and women, many of whom he had personally known to be extremely ordinary people, transform into heroes overnight, offering to give up their lives for a cause far from personal. The manner in which historical circumstances can transport ordinary people living in total obscurity on to the pedestal of immortality overnight was demonstrated before our very eyes on June 18, 2001, and its aftermath in which eighteen young people made the supreme sacrifice. Despite its appeal, because of its essentially militaristic nature of organisation and execution, insurgencies demonstrate a strong tendency towards authoritarianism and fascism.
Hence, much as the state must be urged to shed excessive militarization in tackling this issue, insurgent groups must also be prevailed upon to reorganise and reorient their vision of a healthy society, and most particularly to respect individual liberties and human rights.
One other issue needs urgent consideration. With ground shifts in the paradigms of development and even nationhood, there is a need to introspect and redefine the causes of insurgency in the land. It is not a call for passivity; instead it is an advocacy for reassessing the adequacy of our response to present reality. The ethnic churnings in our immediate neighbourhood will definitely have a bearing on our well being, even if we renounce the path of violence and embrace peace. Hence, the more gainful approach would be to look for a comprehensive peace in the entire area on a consensual understanding of the futility of conflict.
Wider Issues
As stated earlier, discussions on human rights in Manipur always tend to get cloistered as an offshoot of the conflict situation. But there are more to the issue than just this. Apart from these blatant, extremely savage violations of human rights, there are other concerns that run deeper, although they do not command the necessary sense of urgency. For instance, there is nothing as dehumanizing or as big an enemy of dignified living as poverty. And the issue brooks no delay as Manipur’s economy is on the verge of collapse. We still have not seen starvation deaths, but the excruciating pains of poverty are beginning to be felt by an ever-increasing number of people each year.
The bounden duty of a government is to give everything it has to make sure that poverty is alleviated. There is a vital and inalienable link between the management of economy (of a state/region) and the question of human rights. A government’s primary objective must be to create avenues for income generating activities and to bridge the income gaps between different sections of its citizenry to the extent possible. Inability to make the economy regenerative and self-sustaining is ultimately the mother of all rights violations. The crime would be darker if the failure results out of willful neglect by those who are given the responsibility to run the state. There ought to be no doubt that, in the final analysis, it is a government’s ability (or otherwise) to uphold this right, which will spell redemption or damnation for Manipur. Let our own government not forget this either, ever.
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