Reactions and Forging Ahead
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: July 22 2015 -

Manipur has for a long time witnessed voices of protests against the indifference of the ruling regimes on issues of public interests.

While the knee jerk reactions of the Governments have been often countered with strong disapproval of steps taken, observers over a period of time have noticed that issues and movement launched by the people reach their peak only to be affected by the fatigue of dissent.

Under such phenomena, it has become really difficult to assess the true worth of stances whether be it political or social and as time passes by, the relationship between the people and the State hits north with indifference to the very issues that people found worth fighting for.

The localized understanding of what constitutes civil society also gets fuzzier with extreme pressures put on groups and individuals with no demarcated boundaries between social and political expediencies.

Even the conception of citizenship gets blurred in a society afflicted by prolonged political turmoil.

This is why there has been too much confusion created over what has been traditionally understood as empowering rights and protective rights supposedly guaranteed by a modern liberal State.

Even if social and political analysts apply the choicest conceptual frames to get nuanced comprehension of day to day realities, the efforts have not been able to truly grasp the core of the situation.

Gone are the days when keen observers had been blamed for not trying to absorb the “ground situation” as understood in its contextualized frame.

When the ground itself stands on a shaky foundation, it loses sight of far reaching consequences.

This is where the State finds it easy to legitimize its own misrule occupying both temporal and spatial justifications.

Any minute scrutiny of the existing phenomenon shows that there has been a gigantic gap between contextual necessity and foreseeable vision.

Thus, it is natural that the momentum of any given mass movements and the collective energies get depleted in the cacophony of political correctness.

In a region like the Northeast of India, the State tries to put all shades of dissent under the carpet further fueling the tide of popular discontent.

And the actors are often caught in the whirlpool of political redundancy trapped by the constraints of set objectives and means.

This has helped spawn unending contradictions within each of the movements, at time contradicting the objectives of seeking protection with that of political empowerment.

Therein lies the flaw of well intentioned groups and individuals. To forge ahead, one needs to weigh the quantum of the energies spent on launching movements in the true spirit of democratic principles.