NH-39 is our lifeline, we said. It’s the line of passage that operates our life.
It’s the line through which materials for sustenance reached us. Partly true.
For NH-39 also mirrors our lives. It sketches our collective biography. It reflects what life in Manipur had been through the ages.
Even for the most ardent fan of optimism, the tale that NH-39 narrates of us is mired in irony, twisted
tragedy and an incoherent script that ends with a whimper of degeneration. From Mao gate to AOC, the story is a torture in all senses.
It’s obvious we’re in a competitive partnership with Nagaland- in mounting excess check posts along NH-39. The effectiveness- nil.
Pickets on NH-39 are akin to the numerous voluntary associations and JACs we constituted. They conduct dirt. Period.
Picket billboards say you can’t bring in this and that; it’s punishable to do so. But you rarely see a law-enforcer diligently going
through the luggage and parcels.
Rather it’s the busboys that run to them. ‘get ready with the bucks’ is the usual instruction from highway drivers as one approaches a check post.
Check posts are like our departmental institutions- an oasis of graft. It appears they are erected to act as a conduit for easy money,
a lawful compensation for unpunctual deliverance of salary.
So, we are blessed with a porous border more open than the entrance to hell. Smugglers or muggers- they have an ideal passage without a tension for their wares to be entangle in the legal net.
The situation along NH-39 represents a flagrant dereliction of duty by the men in khakhi as they have self-constructed an image as shameless money-grabbing guardians of law.
Our parity with Nagaland does not run for long though. In Rio’s turf one can separate the drain from the road. But ours is a Khichdi, road or drain, it’s hard to tell.
This, on further analysis, boils down to a metaphor for describing Manipur Now.
You see, the debate is no longer about which side of the law one is on; it’s about the type of law and at what price. The dichotomy of
condition throws open variable range of options for Manipuris today.
The structural adjustments thought up to suit the multiplicity of conformity and situation had set, and is not likely to give way to
change for better or worse. Far from black and white simplicity, we sweat out in the grey zone paying the prescribed percentage to the mighty.
With one foot upon the road and the other in the drain, we travel on effortlessly. If them khakhi folks can earn in hundreds without moving an inch out of their cubicle, why not us- the meek subjects? Their act of defiance inspires us and rubbed on
to us in multiple ways.
So we dole out bribes to get a driving license for our underage teens. Thank god, it’s the school building that we are burning today and not yet the pupils who read a
certain syllabus.
Like in NH-39 there is no propriety in our systems. Nothing’s proscribed or prescribed. We survived an established chaos day after day, situation after situation.
The nets of our legal framework and security structure are too detached to arrest trespassers. The educational set-ups
are corrupt much like the check posts along NH-39.
The policing system is wayward, unkempt and haphazard following in the image of our highway that is uni-lane at most places. Sector after sector have floundered.
To borrow Brian Glanville, ‘one thing had all too closely to do with the other’ in their synchronized decrepitude. In a sense, the unthinkable has happened in terms of mismanagement and irregularities pertaining to pivotal organs of the state.
If it’s not some riflemen doing a John Rambo at
Moreh, then it has to be some
sectional interest holding the entire state for ransom. It’s free for all.
The worst fear is, by all indications, we can do much worse unless, different orientation emerges.
How long can we stand to have a third class highway leading to third class towns inhabited by equally imbecile self-righteous citizens?
* H. Lienzamang Gangte, a freelancer from Churachandpur , contributes to e-pao.net regularly. The writer can be contacted at glienza(at)sify(dot)com . This article was webcasted on July 10th, 2007.
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