Losing Trust: Government and people in Manipur

Amar Yumnam *

1st State Level Mahila Congress Campaign Committee Meeting of the Manipur Pradesh Congress Committee on September 26 2016 :: Pix - IT News

Trust plays a very important catalytic role in any social, political and economic processes and their outcomes. The best and most recent example is the sharp decline in the phenomenon of price rise in India during the last two years. The usual process in India about inflation has been that people expect it to rise and the government usually faces the phenomenon of rise in prices.

In Economics, this is known as a case of adaptive expectations. But something has happened to this during the last two years. When the new government formed at the centre under the leadership of Narendra Modi, people had huge expectations and high trust on the capability to perform of this man. This trust and the accompanying expectation have played a major role in explaining the sharp reversal of the trend rise in prices in the country; recent data and research indicate that the global fall in fuel prices has not been the factor responsible for the trend reversal in India.

Fortunately for India, the quality of response of the Prime Minister to the Uri attack as exemplified in the Kozhikode address is such that the trust of the people on him and his government is unlikely to suffer any decline soon. It is in this context that the trust or lack of it between the people of Manipur and the government of Manipur needs our attention and collective appreciation.

Manipur has been an outlier to any dynamics at the national level. While the credibility of the government is on the rise for the country as whole, it is the other way round in Manipur; the credibility of the government of Manipur is at its lowest ebb today. Unfortunately for Manipur, the way the biggest challenger to form the next government, read BJP as it is unfolding in Manipur, does not seem to be coming up with any alternative model for credibility. Rather we hear of rising incapacitation of the BJP.

Looking back, the 1950s and 1960s were the best period of Manipur. The capability of the government was very limited and weak, but people still had trust and expectations. This lacuna was made good by the generalised trust – what we call social capital – among the people and among the various ethnicities. But today something has happened such that, in anything involving the role of the government, trust is invariably the casualty.

This demands an examination of the causes. One most possible explanation of this decline in trust of the government and the rising political articulation along ethnic lines has been the rise in inequality in Manipur. The global experience has been that the losing of trust on the government would always accompany an atmosphere of rising inequality. Something like that has happened in Manipur in its worst form.

Government has been the biggest provider of access to public utilities and largest (in a sense lone) employer of the people outside of the informal sector and traditional farming sector activities. In other words, government has been the more or less the only medium for getting out of low level and very uncertain existence and move to a higher level of wellbeing. This is where the biggest fault-lines emerged.

First, the access to the government provided opportunities occurred to only those who had contacts or could bribe through. Both these routes naturally had the very undesirable impact of inequalising the opportunities among the populace; government in Manipur turned out to be an agent working against the democratic principle of equalisation of opportunities.

Second, this process naturally had the undesirable inequality outcomes based not on efficiency but on contacts and capacity to pay the bribes.

Third, since the access to the opportunity for advancement to the next higher level of wellbeing depended on contacts and ability to bribe, the process of inequality has aggravated inter-generationally. Despite rise in personal capability, the offspring of any worse-off family would continue to get stuck to the lower level of wellbeing as the capacity to generate contacts and capability to bribe would be poor in such households. These processes have led to the present critical scenario of Manipur.

There is an absolute lack of trust of the government in as much as the character of governance has been so institutionalised such that it makes no difference whether it is a central government or a provincial government office. There was a short period till about the 1960s when the Central Government offices in Manipur were seen as centres of cleanliness, but it did not take long for these offices to join the bandwagon of State government offices.

The latest example is the information we are getting about Tatkal process for application of Passports in Imphal – there is nothing to be happy about and proud of in this. It is as if only contacts and bribery can ensure access to anything provided by the government in Manipur.

The government-induced inequality and the inter-generational continuance of this have led to the emergence of declining trust within any group and across ethnicities in a context where government is the largest provider of services as well as biggest formal sector employer. Since merit and other important capabilities do not matter in the access to the opportunities, there has been massive devaluation of the role education plays in ensuring a positive outcome for livelihood. This is never a sustainable strength for any society.

Further, this scenario has eaten into the trust prevailing among members of any ethnicity. Since contacts and bribery are determining factors, even the reservation policies have not yielded the expected results. Within any reserved group, the benefits of reservation have been monopolised by a few families, and this has worsened the inequality over generations.

So as expected the Government of Manipur does not command credibility among the Meeteis, the Nagas, the Kukis and what not. In many instances, the trust among the ethnicities has not been as bad as in cases where government is involved. We observe and hear of many positive interactions among various ethnicities outside of government.

However this positive atmosphere and the accompanying trust become casualties immediately when the government is called for in addressing anything. In fine, the government in Manipur has been the factor responsible for worsening socio-economic inequality and the inter-generational persistence of it in Manipur.

This agent has also been responsible for the ethnic-fractionalisation of socio-political articulations in Manipur. This has been worsening over the last few years with no visible concern on the part of the government. Unfortunately, it remains to be seen how the BJP visualises to address this social malaise of rising inequality and social tensions in Manipur in spite of the Assembly Elections getting closer.

How is the BJP endeavouring to restore trust of the people on the government, and revive the social capital strength of Manipur? Since the Congress has been failing but running government, is the BJP feeling that it can as well ignore this aspect?