NE Peoples' Parliament: Challenges & Response
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: December 12 2015 -
With the accumulation of collective anxiety caused by the failure to creatively express a vision for a unified people’s movement in the Northeast, the 1st North East Peoples’ Parliament (NIPP 2015) has been organised by Coalition for Indigenes’ Rights Campaign (CIRCA), Manipur, Assam Sanmilita Mahasangha (ASM) and Assam Meitei Apunba Lup (AMAL) in Imphal.
The event is indeed an inspirational initiative. While the organisers can be lauded for organising the three-day event, they should be first appreciated for acknowledging the necessity of the times.
The parliament hopes to strengthen peoples’ movement encompassing all the indigenous communities of the Northeast while acknowledging the ineffectiveness of movements which the organisers feel are pre-dominantly “ethno-exclusivist in character.”
The parliament whose raison d’être is the creation of a common platform seems to have truthfully acknowledged the predicament caused by certain intent on executing exclusive solution.
While recognising the problems faced by region as structurally inter-related, there is also a growing need for the bigger indigenous communities to understand the complicated nature of differences within what has often been considered “exclusivist” movements.
A truthful recognition of the dynamics requires no rocket science or even to invoke the ‘challenge-response theory’.
While no one denies that the Northeast India as understood today is just a political construct, the primary question that besets the people of the region is how one recovers the “civilizational category with concrete historical and cultural foundation.”
If they are indeed bound by a common destiny, they are also tied to insulated and redundant concepts, all in the name of launching a unified movement.
Reading too much into “constructed commonalities” while insulating one’s outlook within their own tiny perspectives will not bring in the progress envisaged.
If this parliament has to be truly meaningful, there should be a simple and honest appreciation of internal historical dynamics.
In this context, the success to overcome any challenge requires collective wisdom and not the notion of leadership out of the ‘creative minority’ as postulated.
Here, it should be noted that the emergence of paradigms will be contingent upon the ability to put in perspective the “nearest sight” one beholds.
The parliament so far has correctly assessed the challenges inherited from the primordial past and also acknowledged that external challenges are born out of political, socio-economic and environmental changes in the recent past.
Now, how one extricates himself or herself from the conditional predicament largely depends on how the parliament skilfully re-examines the ‘challenges and response’.
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