Scapegoating As Culture : A Dangerously Costly Culture in Manipur

Amar Yumnam *

Culture is a paramount factor determining the welfare outcome of any society. This is being increasingly appreciated among Economists today so much so that contemporary path-breaking multi-disciplinary research is emerging from this group of social scientists. Here we need not enter into the unending debate on defining culture for our usual understanding of it as our social habits, taboos, beliefs and preferences is enough for our shared understanding.

It may be something inherited (vertical transmission from parents to children), being learned from contemporary interactions (horizontal transmission as students, friends or fellow-workers), or from cross-generation interactions (oblique transmission as from teachers to students).

Culture gives us many benefits of stability, social progress and economic uplifting. But it is not without costs. It is when the benefits exceed significantly the costs involved that we should cherish, nurture and put our collective efforts to upholding those tenets.

In Manipur we talk about the rich culture of the land and the people here, and we have rather been taking things for granted far more than long enough. There are now culture in play and much more powerful than our inherited ones. The time has come for us to really apply our heart and mind to think about the impacting tenets and powerful socio-political forces in play behind these.

This is because it is not always that the tenets of culture are positive. The costs involved can be negative with huge costs to the concerned society. Let us look at three historical examples from across the world. First, there is a group of people called Xhosa in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa; they are the second largest after Zulus.

A 15 year old had prophesised the coming of spirits of ancestors to purify the land of all evil. This led to the killing of 4,00,00 cattle, destruction of corn and non-plantation of crops during 1856-57. What resulted was not the purification of evil forces but famine and consequent dead of thousands of people.

Second, the Fore community in the New Guinea had a tradition of eating the dead bodies of relatives resulting in dead of people caused by an intriguing illness. This tradition was given up only after the cause of the illness was identified as kuru virus in the 1950s. Another example of dangerous persistence is found relating to the anti-Semitic attitude among the Germans.

The Jews were considered as responsible for the mid-14 century (1348-1350) sufferings due to plague – “scapegoating the Jews for miseries of the plague”. This feeling got encoded into the social functioning of the Germans, and we know the results of this.

Now my fear is that if we are following certain culture whose costs outweigh the benefits by a huge margin. By and large the global experience has been one of giving up a culture whose costs overrun the benefits. Given this, how can it be that the questionable culture gets encoded into social functioning and persists?

In Manipur the questionable culture yields huge personal benefits at much higher public costs; it is a case of private benefits overruling the public costs. The next question which arises is: If the public costs are higher than the private benefits, how can the particular culture persist? The most intriguing feature of the culture in question in Manipur is: It is governance-induced; government is behind it.

Let us have it by example. There is a saying, which runs as: The King is dead. Long live the King. But this is not exactly so in a democracy where there is periodic review of representatives by the people. In this one recent exemplar of governance induced negative culture is the appointment to positions whose entitlements can be claimed only after the present government’s term is over.

The second example is the promise the other day by the present individual sitting in the position of Head of the People of Manipur that something significant is going to be done in honour of the venerated Hijam Irawat Singh. Third, the same Head of the People of Manipur had started and inaugurated many projects before full-completion (Swasti Pujah before Birth) in the company of the Head of the People of India and the Extra-Constitutional Lady in Power during the last fifteen years covering three spans of periodic reviews by the people.

However anything significant has not been completed or borne fruit; the best example I have in mind is the Heavy Fuel Project. In all the non-performance, under-performance, failures, near-failures and non-honouring of promises the governance of the land has got scapegoats fully ready in hand. Time is the prime accused; any recruitment process unfulfilled or any promise un-honoured is due to the available time being shorter than the required.

The secondary accused is the shortage or late-release of the funds from the Central coffers. The third accused is the prevalence of disturbances caused by the anti-state agents. So for every kind of non-performance and failures, the governance has over the last fifteen years created a tremendous stock of scapegoating culture. In order to sustain this culture, the persons in control of governance have to create an atmosphere of binding obligations among certain individuals and households.

One way to do this is accept bribe from these households or individuals. This way the binding is for both those whose promises were fulfilled and un-fulfilled. This s! capegoating approach and the obligatory binding are so encoded into the social functioning today. It is politically beneficial for a Naga leader to blame the Meeteis as scapegoats for their lack of development.

This process has now generalised to the entire population of Manipur. This has naturally resulted into a very negative trait of envy. Instead of emulating the higher income and competitive strength of others (positive envy), the generalised approach is one where we indulge in activities to reduce the competitiveness and income of others (negative envy).

The culture of Manipur today aligns well with that of the “precolonial Kuba Kingdom which had many features of modern state, including a sophisticated legal system, professional bureaucracy, and police force, as well as established historical boundaries defined by the structure of the river system in the area…….[F]ield experiments with individuals residing within the historical frontier of the Kuba Kingdom and those outside that frontier [find] that the former are less likely to follow the rules and more likely to steal”. The only difference in Manipur is the uniformity of the negative character today.