The Alternative Arrangement, What does it really mean ?
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: July 02 2011 -

The demand for an 'Alternative Arrangement' for the indigenous Naga population is at best murky and confounding. Most tribal bodies in Manipur dingle dangle with basic demands by seeking a king's ransom.

But by an 'alternative arrangement', one is forced to construe of various shades of intellectual reasoning. We were befuddled by simple issues like 'Is an arrangement to be given to an alternative, or 'Does an alternative need an arrangement' ?

One modestly seeks to ask whether we are to arrange the alternate, or what ? We should be ever careful of dotting the 'I's and crossing the 'T's. In our haste to please we could easily land up empty handed.

In a humble submission in order to clear cobwebs clouding judgments, the first query is, was there ever an agreed to arrangement that some of us now seeks an alternative for ?

If ever there was, who imposed this arrangement from the point of view of jurisprudence and social acceptability ?

If the perceived unhappiness stems not from a statuary background but from 'derived' experiences of frustration and denials, then we have to first accept the historicity of the fact that there was never an inked arrangement.

In which case the 'arrangement' could only be the one which grew from the womb of the Indian Constitution.

And if this argument is to be furthered, why are the majority population of Manipur being targeted as the source of conflict and lack of satisfaction, particularly so when Manipuris were not even given the chance to speak for or against the composition of the constitution of India ?

By the way, at the historical stage when the Indian Constitution was being drafted, Manipur already had a popular government running according to the ambit of its own constitution, and the government had inducted in its cabinet, tribal ministers without any fuss.

But all this was not an 'arrangement' it was the product of a symbiotic relationship.

However since the preferred term is 'alternative arrangement' one can deduce that we are referring to the arrangement which the government of India has provided constitutionally, in which case one ponders and scratches one's head, why is the ire not being directed against the Central government ?

As this 'alternative arrangement' came after the Merger Agreement, people are furtively trying to find out its antecedents, though with little success.

Honestly one thought by an 'alternative arrangement' the reference was to a wig, or at the most a set of false teeth.