Politics and Polarization
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: June 04 2015 -

The struggle to overcome communal and ethnic polarization in India is much older than the dawn of independence.

However, the issue of polarization has been kept afloat vis-à-vis the ideological divide between prominent political parties in the country.

While the Indian National Congress has often been blamed for appeasing the minorities, those parties owing allegiance to right winged ideology have been accused of pushing forth the amorphous agenda of the majority community.

The constant failure of the State had further accentuated the trend and this failure is rooted in a tendency on the part of competing political elites to pursue the politics of dominance and subservience.

The politics of dominance and subservience has had indelible impact on the nature of the country’s engagement with the classical vision of democratic principles.

The fault-lines are now further deepened by contestations of meanings, repression of certain possibilities and realization of set targets.

Northeast of India as a region has also been affected by the politics of representation, construction and production of perceptions by the vast majority of the ruling class in the country.

This does not however mean that politicization of polarization has been unique to mainland India.

The Northeast region too had to shoulder certain baggage based on the great ethnic divide between tribes and communities based on religious and cultural moorings.

The masses have been constantly fed with inadequate and at times distorted information and images of minorities, tribes and marginalized social groups by the ruling elites in almost the similar pattern executed by the mainstream ruling classes.

The depth of the dent in contemporary politics can be well be gauged by the fact that those in helm of affairs have rarely considered viewing the perspectives offered by the fringe groups with alternative worldviews.

Asking the ruling class to entertain alternative ideas has been indeed made difficult due to the overarching dominance of redundant views that needs analytical revision.

This basically means there is a necessity to overhaul existing discourse which cannot go beyond the control and confines of certain historical phase that has little relevance now.

Transforming the understanding of key issues in a state like Manipur needs impassionate review of historical inconsistencies instead of arousing passion with no objective relevance.