KCP militants after arrest in New Delhi. File picture
The news that seven prominent underground organisations of Manipur have decided to join hands to regain the lost sovereignty of Manipur might sound like another rehashed version of the tomes of ideological literature that militant groups from that state have churned out over the years.
Yet it also shows that far from becoming redundant, the armed militia of Manipur are digging in their heels to pursue a course of action they believe is integral to their mental sanity and political integrity. I have always maintained that the bugle of militancy trumpeted by the Meiteis in the valley is equal and proportionate to the rabble rousing of the NSCN (I-M). As long as the one exists the other will co-exist. It is a different matter that the Government of India pays scant respect to the Meiteis. It can afford to, since there is no single voice; only an unintelligible chorus of cacophony.
The KCP, KYKL, UNLF, RPF, Prepak, Prepak (P) and the UPPK allegedly had a high-level and high-decibel discussion on the future course of action on July 8-9. A co-ordinating committee of the seven organisations elected RPF president Irengbam Chaoren as the convenor for this committee.
The outflow of condemnation of India is predictable at such meetings. Certainly the anti-India sentiment is what keeps these otherwise ideologically disparate groups together. These cavalier statements, coming as they do with repeated frequency and repackaging, no longer make news. They only expose the poverty of words and the paucity of vocabulary to define the movement which has been marked by extortion and killing and nothing more.
Togetherness
The latest India-bashing stance surprises no one. The group says India has been ceaselessly exerting its maximum effort in imposing its grip in the region and hence the need to fight together against the former has become a matter of necessity. It said the co-ordination committee will work out modalities for the seven underground organisations of Manipur to work together. The statement attributes this change of heart (coming together instead of venturing alone) to general public pressure. To the untrained eye it might seem as if the militants have a mandate from the people to converge and make common cause. I am not too sure that such a referendum took place in Manipur in recent times.
Manipur dilemma
Who is the general public that the militants are speaking of? Who are these “general public” with a nationalistic fervour who are willing to break out of the mould of Indian nationhood to chart out a different path? If asked to put up a show of hands, I wonder how many will buy the idea of the seven revolutionary outfits. But that has been Manipur’s dilemma. Some have completely identified with the political parameters of existence defined by the Indian State; others remain ambivalent enjoying the greenery on both sides of the fence and waxing eloquent about their perceived political ideologies in the best platforms provided by the Indian State. There is a third category that is by definition anti-India and makes no bones about it.
But what about the voiceless commoner who lives by her wit from one day to the next eking out an existence and belongs neither to this, that or other category? To my mind this is the category that is afflicted by “anomie”. Anomie, as defined by Liah Greenfeld in the book Nationalism and the Mind, denotes a condition of acute inconsistency between different values, norms and cognitions, including the perception of reality. This leaves the individual vulnerable to social influence. His (gender neutral) ability to use his individual judgement is impaired by the cognitive confusion he finds himself in.
The impairment of this ability destroys the basis of individual action and leaves one hardly capable of being an individual in any sense but a physical one. Such individuals are easily influenced and persuaded by charismatic leaders. And it must be said to the credit of militant outfits that their leaders are always well educated, fluent in terrorist ideologies, great followers of Mao and Che Guevera and perhaps even of Osama bin Laden.
So the large chunk of Manipur’s population really have no view and are perhaps unaware of the regrouping of the seven most virulent militant outfits. What they want is to be left alone to find their livelihoods without having to shell out a percentage to pay this or that militant group to keep the bullets away. But will they have it so easy? The dichotomies of Manipur are plenty. That state has the largest number of flights connecting it to Delhi.
Each of the flights runs full. What do you make of this? There is a huge population of Manipuris (Meiteis, Nagas, Zos etc) who travel this route regularly and a good number work, study and live in the national capital. Do they have a problem with India? Yes they do.
The problem is about India’s ignorance of apart of its own whole — the neglected periphery, to borrow a phrase from the academia. The people of Manipur resent the arrogance of the average Indian who treat them like pariahs, who believe the women are easily available and fair game for rape and molestation. This is a different predicament!
What we are interested in here is why the armed militia resent the very notion of India and its sovereign authority. Is it because sovereignty also implies a certain elitism which is represented by the Aryan-Dravidian-Hindu combine and which excludes the other racial categories especially those that inhabit the geographical space in the far eastern corner of India? These racial categories —Tibeto-Burman, Austro-Asiatic find no mention in India’s sacred texts and the historical narratives of ancient India.
In a sense these are new acquisitions by an India whose idea is not its own but which is the outcome of a carefully crafted body of several independent nations stitched together by a foreign power.
Elitism rules
James Mills very aptly summed up this idea of India when he said, “A man may obtain more knowledge of India in one year in his closet in England than he could obtain during the course of the longest life, by the use of his eyes and ears in India.”
This shows us how even a historian of Mill’s calibre found it hard to understand India, its myriad histories and its incredible diversity. And yet Mills never ventured into the Northeast.
It would be interesting to find out his views had he done so. Sunil Khilnani in his book The Idea of India, says of Mills— “There are no interpretational prizes to be won for seeing Mills’ history as an instance of promiscuous, bad-mannered European Orientalism.”
One thing Mills did very systematically was to assault India’s Hindu past and to discount the very idea of Indian unity. This was what perhaps prompted the Indian rulers post-Independence to strive at this artifice called unity.But are we united psychologically, mentally and even spiritually? No we are not because of the perceptions of racial superiority by some parts of the whole.
I guess this is what the proud Meiteis struggle so hard to say. After all, they, too, are practitioners of Vaishnavism in all its purity and sanctity. Yet they will never really be Indians or Hindus in that real sense of the term. At least that is the perception in Manipur among the intellectual class.
(The writer can be contacted at patricia17@rediffmail.com)
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