Manipur writhes helplessly on the altar of political expediency

V Sudarshan

Journalist and Author

THE noise of the European Parliament coming down hard on India was louder than the guard of honour that greeted Prime Minister Narendra Modi at Orly, France. At the EU Parliament in Strasbourg, sandwiched between votes on political disqualifications in Venezuela and the crackdown on the freedom of expression in Kyrgyzstan, India arrived with the mess in Manipur, not with a bang but with a banging. Speaker after speaker wagged an accusatory finger at New Delhi for utter dereliction, talking as though New Delhi were Rwanda. Over 50,000 displaced and in 350-odd relief camps because of ethnic strife is a catastrophic figure, even for the Europeans. New Delhi is behaving as though through its lenses it is just another day in paradise, like Europe of yore.

The good news is that even EU now stands ready to help build peace and trust in Manipur, if requested, of course. A tantalising possibility was held out to send a Special Envoy on Religious Freedoms as well. A new trade agreement with EU could now be conditional on ‘iron-clad guarantees’ on progress on human rights. They are even holding out the threat of banding India with other countries outside Europe that feel similarly. As the scope of the attack on India broadens, Pakistan and China are surely chortling with delight; their work lightened, and not so much by the EU Parliament either.

One way to look at it is that this is a failure, fair and square, of the Ministry of External Affairs from preventing the genie from getting out of the bottle. They could have done better. Their role in the matter will now come to privately parsing these developments into insignificance. It is time to get real, though. Manipur borders Myanmar, a near-Chinese vassal state; the oversight on inter-country movement in those parts is lax at best; people come and go as they please. Many North-East militants are thought to speak Mandarin or, more specifically, the Kunming dialect in their sleep. Why hand it over to the other side, beribboned and gift-wrapped? There could be worse things than a humanitarian intervention, although, thank goodness, we are far from that yet. Or should the blame lie with those who cynically lost the plot in Manipur, even though some wonder what the plot was in the first place? Imagine the damage-control going on behind the scenes. It is a full-time occupation. First the lecture by American Ambassador Eric Garcetti, then the arrival of Under Secretary for Civilian Security, Democracy and Human Rights Uzra Zeya. And now this, the European Parliament’s sharp rap on the knuckles. It is a bit much to expect the world to close its eyes to what has been going on since at least May.

We got glimpses of the grim soap opera playing out in last week’s Supreme Court hearings; the reality surely could be far worse. More than two months after clashes first broke out, unidentified and unclaimed bodies lie rotting in Imphal’s many mortuaries. The court is being told that even to identify these bodies relatives would require armed escort, and safe passage to last rites. Not only is there an appalling absence of essential medicines in hospitals but also machines such as those for dialysis and CT scans, both in the plains and in the hill districts. With life out of gear, education processes such as examinations have gone belly-up. Schools and universities and such places are now overcrowded refugee camps. Students and the sundry government staff have fled. Baghdad must have seen better days during the peak of American bombing. This is not a bead count for relief camps, but there are more in other places run self-reliantly than you can count on a standard issue abacus. In Churachandpur alone, there are more than a hundred camps which are being run not by the government but by self-help groups. This is not the self-reliance Gandhi and Ambedkar envisaged for the India of 2023, at the time of Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav. Ask the Manipuris. Or their neighbours, the Indian ones. Imagine the shortage of drinking water, food, bedding, shelter and sanitation facilities.

There are no convincing answers to the Supreme Court’s questions on the thousands of looted rounds of ammunition and heavy-duty assault weaponry. In any other state, missing weapons call for a serious investigation and action against the guardians of the armouries and police stations. In Manipur, all we have seen so far are drop-boxes. It is a situation which would have given even Kafka nightmares. Most cellphone services remain down, as is the Internet. This is the old Kashmir playbook; the second edition is darker. On the ground, further alienation is definitely on the cards. Meanwhile, New Delhi is present only in empty poll sloganeering in faraway Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.

It has been suggested to the Supreme Court that the inter-agency unified command set up under the chairmanship of security adviser Kuldiep Singh really functions under the leadership of Chief Minister N Biren Singh. Meanwhile, the rot is running deeper and wider.

What is the way forward? It looks as if New Delhi is operating under the cover of Article 355 — all the power with no accountability. It does even less to help bring Manipur under control. If this is the situation after the appointment of an inquiry commission and a peace committee under the chairmanship of the Governor, then it can be said that neither the current relief nor rehabilitation efforts allegedly underway are working with any degree of efficacy. That apples to the unhealthy political embrace of Biren Singh as well.

Rebuilding churches is a distant goal. Imposition of Article 356 and removal of Biren Singh have suggested themselves to be the extremely logical baby steps on Manipur’s road ahead. Ahead of the Assembly elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh, neither of them, alas, is politically palatable. Manipur writhes helplessly on the altar of political expediency.

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#France #Manipur #Narendra Modi