Our Land: Turning against the public in everything

Amar Yumnam *

I am not sure if we the public can ever claim our land as ours. I say this from two angles.

First, we now see an increasing trend of monopolizing the thinking of the land and people by a few organizations, particularly by a few scoundrels and scallywags piggy-riding on the frontal bodies of these organisations to find a personal foothold in the various institutions of the State.

This group of people would not be any asset, as insincere and incompetent as they are, to neither the organisations they claim to be close to and working for nor to the institutions they attempt to get a personal foothold.

But it is this group which is largely responsible for the increasing resistance to the protagonist organisations for social change. Whatever the case, the reality is the public bearing the brunt of their misconduct and silently at that.

But what I intend to highlight in this intervention is the squeezing of the public emanating from the state. The immediate provocation is the response of the state to the recent spate of killing of non-locals by unidentified groups.

This response smacks of continuation of the design of turning against the public in every turn of events, and in the process falling into the trap of the provocateurs.

The Background:

I need to elaborate further on the second aspect of turning against the public. We know for sure that the state has been fighting for at least three decades against insurgency and other anti-social elements fishing in the consequential troubled waters.

By this time, the state should have been in a position to evolve a countering strategy unique to the land. But quite unfortunately this has not been so. Instead we are experiencing a kind of situation where the security forces have been engaged as the sole agency to tackle the crises.

This has many other unfortunate implications. First, the security forces have been too over-engaged to enable themselves to evolve a kind of thinking and strategy to counter such crises whenever they occur.

Secondly, it amounts to yielding to the same charge of militarising the State in the name of fighting the insurgency and other crises, as every time they are the ones utilised to address the problems.

Thirdly, continual and unchanged utilisation of the security forces as the sole agency to face crises has numbed the political class and the civil administration from any evolution of mind appropriate to the crises.

So ultimately what we have is a position where the security forces are not allowed to gain maturity, and the political class enjoys itself in a world of non-application of mind.

The danger of over-utilization of security forces results in some very dangerous outcomes.

First, the security forces personnel in the fields interacting directly with the public are not appropriately trained to handle the public with care.

Rather majority of them visualise themselves as having been empowered against the public, and this very attitude turn the public against them and the state when the situation was ripe for mobilising them in favour of them.

This scenario is well exemplified by the recent handling of crisis caused by the killing of non-locals on two consecutive days. The public were digesting the situation fast and starting to feel widespread disgust with that kind of killing.

But the public dissatisfaction and anger was not allowed to mature into a kind of movement for non-recurrence of such incidents, and the public were instead subjected to the harassment of the curfew.

So the response of the administration to the crisis was not one of addressing the probable causes of such brutality, but one of turning against the public as has always been the case in the past.

We have examples from other States in the country. When there was a series of explosions in the local trains of Mumbai, common life was allowed to get back to normal in real time.

When there were deadly explosions in the Soroijini Nagar Market in Delhi, the administration saw to it that the Diwali spirit of the people were not allowed to suffer.

But in the case of Manipur, the recent crises were utilised by the administration as excuses enough to kill the spirit of Holi, the biggest festival of the land.

Ultimate Plea:

Well, our only plea is that both state and non-state agents should restore the land to the people.

The people have had enough of the scoundrels and scallywags behaving as frontal thinkers of some powerful organisations but rather trying to only establish a personal foothold for themselves in the various public institutions of the land.

The people have had enough of the state turning against the public exactly in cases when it should be taking the public along. Enough is enough.