The Government of Manipur annually incurs an expenditure of above Rs. 3,000 crores. Now one may ask what is this expenditure for.

The normal and usually prompt reply would be that it is meant for the welfare of the people. To this I would like to put a second round of questions: why should the government be interested in the welfare of the people? Has there been any perceptible experience of welfare by the people?

Well, the government is not interested in the welfare of the people in its own sake. The government should be interested in the welfare of the people because that is how a state and its society sustain. So for the sustenance of the state, the government as the medium of functioning of the state, has necessarily to look after the welfare of the people.

What is state:

Here we need to be very clear on what is this called ‘state’. Human beings have been in existence even before the creation of the state. Well the problems of the societies before the creation of the state were the near impossibility of having long term contracts and reliable trade relationships.

Even if relationships, exchange and otherwise, were established, there was no mechanism to tackle violations of commitments. So state is an instrument, an organization human beings have evolved to add reliability to exchange and relationships, and to enforce commitments.

In this the state in successful countries has helped in enhancing the overall atmosphere of trust among the population. The state is also the only organization which the human beings have endowed with the legitimate power to use violence. But this power to use force is for the sole purpose of maintaining order needed for fruitful and progressive relationships between and among people.

Now the expenditure of more than Rupees 3,000 per year by the Government of Manipur is to perform this function of the state – protect and maintain order, enhance trust and facilitate non-violent networks among the population. In other words, it is the unfailable duty of the state to establish and foster an atmosphere of the rule of law.

As I always say, we should not confuse this with the insurgency related law and order problem, for what the insurgents are challenging is not the general need of a rule of law in a society but the authority of the present state to administer it.

Where state has failed:

Now we need to ask what has been the value of the money we are spending every year on the continuation of government in terms of its performance. Well, it is zero; there is no order and no trust in any sector relating to the government functioning. We have the schools not functioning, colleges not performing, departments only in name and what not.

However, what worries me most is not this failure, but the absolute compromise on the core character of the state. As I said, among all the organizations evolved by human beings, state is the only one legitimately empowered to use force and violence in the maintenance of order.

But, as I have been continuously emphasizing in quite a few of my interventions, the state has now been unfortunately reduced to a silent spectator (and hence tacit collaborator) to organized crime and use of force. In other words, the aggressive rent-seeking of the functionaries of the state has now been decentralized to cover organized groups. But in the process, we incur a double cost of maintaining the state and much more damaging atmosphere of absence of rule of law.

Well, it might be useful that a group catches hold of a supposedly perpetrator of crime, but if the group itself starts dispensing justice, only anarchy would result. What if the criminals themselves form a group and start fighting back, because the state as the powerful third party is non-functional.

What, in this fast changing society, an innovative and progressive young person is perceived to be a threat to a group leader’s status and respectability in the long run? The latter is fully rational if he invents reasons and mobilizes his group for finishing the young man with ideas, and the state does not exist either.

A rapist may have his house dismantled and shunted out from a particular locality by collective action. But is this really a punishment? He can as well repeat the crime in his new location.

In crime redressal, it is absolutely important that the criminal is appropriately booked, not given any opportunity for further crime, and his suffering serves as a deterrent to others. We now increasingly see instances of groups closing shops of other groups or individuals on grounds fixed and established by the former. These are the grounds the criminality or otherwise of them would be highly debatable.

To put in short, detecting and stopping crime is the responsibility of all, including the state, but administering justice is and should be the sole responsibility of the state. This is the only way we can sharpen the intelligence of the state and enhance the alertness of the people. This is the only way we can establish an atmosphere of rule of law.

Next Government:

It is at this juncture of the society that we now have the general elections due. Given the kind of state we have experienced over the last two decades in particular, I am not sure if the people would be really exercising their franchise with a view to maximizing social enhancement instead of individual aggrandizement.

But I would definitely appeal to the to-be-elected representatives to reinvent the state in Manipur for a long term order and growth. It would be in their interest as well, for in the otherwise case they are also equally doomed.

It is exactly a situation where the role of the leaders becomes much more critical than that of the led.