KYKL shares thought on raising day-II
Source: The Sangai Express

Imphal, April 25 2017: The merger of Kangleipak into the Indian Union poses a serious threat to the survival of Kanglei Nation.

The project of Hindutva has launched an intense offensive against the identities of WESEA using two powerful weapons namely political power and development.

Development is the catchword of mankind in the entire world.

Good or benevolent politics is perceived as the politics/policy/programme which can bring development.

The basic objective of all business men and companies is earning maximum profits.

Likewise, personal objective of common people is development and economic well being.

In the present, the people of Kangleipak are being fed with the poisonous ideology of Hindutva which is coated with the sweet word of development.

While political leaders have been rejoicing that they would be able to obtain huge funds from Delhi, common people feel gratified that speedy development can be realised, Oken continued.

Over the past 68 years, all the productive capacity of the society has been destroyed completely.

Now Kangleipak is totally dependent on India economically.

Under such situation, people would be swooned when people talk about development.

Now, development and political power are being used to poison the people and few people would believe.

Even if they believe the toxicity of development and political power, they would consume it as survival is more important.

"We would perish in our struggle to survive.

The only way to free ourselves from such predicament is to protect our identity", the KYKL Chairman stated.

Protection of identity requires two premises.

First, identification of the distinctive identity and choosing a career to protect the distinctive identity.

The first premise entails identification of values central to the distinctive identity and the second one entails prescription of behaviour and put values into practice.

At the same, politics of identity protection can lead to communal conflicts and confrontations.

As such, there is a school of thought which says that identity politics is not productive.

They are Marxist, post-identity, post-nationalism and post-modernist theorists, Oken asserted.

But there are two types of identity namely 'good identity' and 'bad identity'.

Identity politics which is aimed at suppressing other communities belongs to the second category.

On the other, identity politics pursued by suppressed people in their struggle for survival is a 'good identity' politics.

One fundamental argument of the Marxist school of thought is that workers across the world have no country of their own which means they do not have any ethnic identity.

But this is argument is not universal but contextual.

While Stalin maintained that the Soviet Union would be a culture, national in form and socialist in substance, Lenin categorically stated that one can take recourse to nationalism to advance socialist revolution.

At the same time, socialists have not yet abandoned the idea of nation.

Communism advocates that there would be neither nation nor identity in a communist society.

This implies that nation/nationality would exist until communism is established in a society.

But communism is too far-fetched at the moment.

By corollary, the question of identity will remain very much alive at the moment, Oken continued.

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