Unique decline and meaningful inroads
- Double squeeze on the people -

Amar Yumnam *

The Government has been saying for long that development works are being hampered by the insurgents, the contracts are being monopolised and compromised by them, offices are being unnecessarily intervened by these and what not.

On the other hand, these admissions imply that the insurgents have been successful in making the existing state increasingly ineffective and irrelevant. It would be to the advantage of the insurgent organisations that the prevailing state, against which they are waging a war of one kind or another, becomes non-functional sooner than later. If the existing state dies out, and if they could step into the vacuum, they would be getting into history books.

Now Inroads: Recently there have arisen some more twists to this increasing influence of the insurgents. Earlier their external and direct interventions were making the government incapable of executing its administrative and developmental functions. Now there is one revelation and another admission during the last few weeks.

An investigation into a heinous crime speaks of not only the particular crime but more crimes also having been directed from the prison cells by a prisoner now jailed in the most secured prison of the province. This establishes something much more than the insurgents "disturbing" the development schemes of the government.

In other words, it shows how they have been able to make inroads into the very security machinery of the government either through implanting representatives of the organisations into the security sector or by colluding with the security personnel of the government.

As if this was not lapse enough for the government security sector, there comes the open admission by the head of the people of the land in the legislature that gangs working together with some personnel of security forces for acts of extortions from the foundation of democracy (the public) have become a nuisance difficult to rein in.

Now these two realities betray how fragile the government and governance of the land have become. From the side of the insurgents, the times show how far they have reached in their objective of making the existing state irrelevant and non-functional.

What About the Insurgents: As we know what has happened and is happening to the existing state mainly under the impact of the widening and deepening grip of the insurgents, we may justifiably ask as to what is happening on the side of insurgents themselves.

What we increasingly feel is that instead of a clean, pure, patriotic-driven, and disciplined organisations, the insurgents groups are becoming more parochial and corruption driven than the departments of the government are. Factionalism has increasingly become the hallmark of the organisations.

In as much as they have made inroads into the functionaries of the government, the latter seems to have more than paid the former in their own coin. This is happening in an atmosphere where the domain of influence of any of the insurgent groups is neither pure nor exclusive.

What Happens to the Public: We have examples in history where the prevailing state declines but a new one emerges on the horizon with rising legitimacy. But what is happening in Manipur is absolutely unprecedented in the sense that the prevailing state in being increasingly made suspect, ineffective and lose command over governance, but the anti state forces themselves are showing signs of decay and irrelevancy.

The insurgent organisations are increasingly displaying signs of acquiring the very despised characteristics of the existing state. They too seem not particularly keen to identify with the cause and worries of the public unless these serve their transitory goals.

The tragic impact of the qualitative decline of both state and non-state forces is the death they are causing to the values, ethos and institutions of the land. This scenario is accompanied by the capacity of both the parties to cause death to the general public. Now anyone can get killed without accountability, and it could be effect equally by either state and non-state forces, or, even worse, a combined force of the state and the non-state agents.

These are genuinely life threatening situations in the real sense of the term. The state faces a decline in its capacity to govern, while the non-state does have the capability to govern either. Time is now for both to think of the people for in the absence of the public both would be irrelevant.