A scandal at Manipur University

Thangkhanlal Ngaihte *

A building at Manipur University (MU), Canchipur :: Pix - Deepak Oinam

If you are someone who depend on the daily newspapers in Manipur to make sense of the state, you may be forgiven for thinking that the hill tribal people of the state are a bunch of losers. Can they do anything other than make loud complaints, write condemnations, and try to block every development ideas that the government thought up? Why should they be suspicious of every initiative that the government take regarding them? They have their own MLAs and MDCs representing them in the state administration, after all.

As it turned out, complaining about injustice and discrimination may be all they afford to do. And getting heard in the state media may be all they get for their shoutings. It's a truism that those who wield real power do so silently; it is the powerless who are out in the streets and shout.

I have been haunted by these thoughts as I read through the memorandum recently submitted to president Pranab Mukherjee by the Manipur University Tribal Students Union (MUTSU) jointly with Manipur Tribal Rights Forum, Delhi. MUTSU has been highlighting the gross anomalies regarding ST reservations in the Manipur University for sometime now. The immediate issue is about the non-compliance by MU to the Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Amendment Act, 2012 which has stipulated 31 percent reservation for scheduled tribes. But, what really caught my attention are the data on the category-wise composition of the existing faculty in the university.

The data, compiled by MUTSU, shows that there are 70 professors in the various schools of Manipur University, none of these were from the ST category. There are 40 associate professors, none of whom are from ST. Out of 61 assistant professors, 10 are from ST; four of them, according to the data, were selected under unreserved pool. Which means that only six out of 61 assistant professors were recruited under the ST quota. In all, the state tribals occupy 3.3 percent of all faculty seats in MU.

I have known that the STs are hugely under-represented, but sheer scale shocked me. I got in touch with MUSU leaders who assured me that they had gone over the faculty list of all departments carefully and make the compilation based on that.

Manipur University was set up in 1980. Till 2005, it was a state university. As a state university, the tribals in Manipur are entitled, by law, to 31 percent of the staff and faculty recruitments and student admissions. After it was converted into a central university in 2005, the argument was put forward that the reservation for scheduled tribes will now be 7.5 percent, which is the national norm.

The Central Educational Institutions (Reservation in Admission) Amendment Act, 2012, which received presidential assent on 19 June, 2012, has now specified that in the seven northeastern states, the reservations for admissions in central educational institutions will follow the proportion of population of various categories. Accordingly, in Manipur, reservations will be in the order of 31, 2 and 17 percentages for STs, SCs and OBCs respectively even though in the case of STs, their proportion to the total population as per the latest census is more than 31 percent). Fifty percent will be recruited under unreserved category.

The fact that there are simply no tribal professors and associate professors tell us that violation of the reservations policy was at its grossest during the time the university was a state university. Indeed, the MUTSU memorandum says that in 2005, there were only two tribal faculty members out of the total strength of 125. Given these facts, it is undeniable that something akin to what someone has called 'ethnic cronyism' has been at work here since a long time. All the shouting that the tribals occasionally do doesn't mean a thing.

This is, of course, not an isolated situation. In a paper presented at a seminar we had conducted way back in 2005 in Delhi, Dr. John H. Pulamte, then president of the All Tribal Students Union Manipur (ATSUM) had explained the modus operandi employed to get round the reservation norms. He said: 'In Manipur, reservation policy that was supposed to benefit the SC/STs has been cleverly exploited first by dividing the "grades" into different cadres and then ignoring with intent the roster system. For example, group "D" posts are segregated into Drivers, Chowkidars, Gardeners, Ward Boy, Mason Helper, Peon, etc. and are recruited one by one so that most of the posts goes to the major communities.

Unlike other states of the country, the state of Manipur has also been cleverly using the term "general" in place of "unreserved" so that only a specific group of people occupies the "open" seats.' The MUTSU memorandum states that to facilitate this loot, technique adopted was 'peacemeal' recruitment, so that the ST reservation point need not be taken into consideration. When you advertised for two positions, and then one and then three, where does the 31 or 7.5 percentage comes in? No wonder, Pulamte used the word 'clever' at least three times.

Dr. Pulamte went on to claim that the Meitei people, 'who constitute a little more than half of the state population are getting more than 80 percent of all government jobs and seats.' He gave a data showing percentage of STs in Class I and II posts in 14 departments of the state government (as in 2003). The data shows that the Industries Department, at 26%, has the highest proportion of tribal employees while the Veterinary and Animal Husbandry department, at 4.7 % has the lowest proportion of tribal employees.

These figures speak for themselves. Unfortunately, there is nothing to show that the situation has changed for the better. I am very sad that the majority community, while glibly talking of hill-valley unity and oneness with slogans like 'ching-tam amatani', did not try to practice the first principle of moulding unity.

The surest way to win people over to our side to give them a stake, to make them stateholders in the state's administration, welfare and economy. To make them an integral part of the state. To integrate them so deep inside that anything that hurts the state also hurts them. If you serially exclude them and deprive them of what's due to them, can you really complain when they want to get out? One should be scared of someone who have nothing left to lose.