July must be the month of ill timing. The last time this ill-fated month came along, a young woman met an untimely death. And while the valley burned in outrage, time stood still for what seemed like an eternity. This time around, the theater of outrage (or the perceived definition of it) shifteth yonder beyond the forbidden valley.

To be precise, it saw two unrelated events lending twin hands to throttle an already gasping valley. The first relates to a holiday and is probably continuing even as we speak. The second relates to a 3 decade old headache indirectly created by the former, and by virtue of July being the default protest month, coincided with a protest that is unabashedly anti-valley and anti-economy, when it is actually neither of both.

The Sadar Hills Question has traditionally been viewed from a safe distance. Averted, anathemised, or otherwise, the view towards this part of the state has only occasionally been opinionated. The interest lies somewhere between the disinterested, the unconcerned, and the unsympathetic, or in a combination of all three, which in turn, evokes either revulsion or rage or bewilderment, or all three, in any given order of importance.

What is outstanding in this long-standing issue is the complete absence of a solution, or even a hint of it. Perhaps the only common denominator in the Sadar Hills conclusion, apart from the legacy of political inconclusion, is the pursuit of habitual self- flagellation.

The demand for a separate district comprising areas of the Sadar Hills is not a new one. It is also not an entirely unjustified demand. Common sense dictates that it should have been transformed into a reality along with the creation of Imphal East and West, or even of Bishnupur and Thoubal.

It is not separatism or regionalism per se. The rationale behind Sadar Hills is that its inhabitants find themselves increasingly underdeveloped and under-administered in a 'no man's land' between Senapati and Sekmai. The present administrative setup simply does not have the capacity or the resources to manage the entire area.

The Autonomous Hill Council remains predisposed between oscillating periods of intense inaction and almost total concentration on private and personal welfare goals. What should have been for the many has been only for a few.

The demand arises more out of necessity than out of choice. Its emotional content is therefore the result of being discounted for an unnecessarily prolonged period. This is a bitter reality, but the fact remains that one cannot just block or bandh or wish it away.

A district is a district in the total sense of the term when it includes a plan for every part within it. Many of the real-time difficulties faced in the Sadar Hills are the result of administrative oversights. They are also the offspring of an unsuccessful dilution of previous problems.

And although political guile has confidently asserted that there is indeed a solution to the problem, experience has proved that there is a problem to every solution, and often more than one.

In the present context, if the present Senapati district includes a plan for the Sadar Hill areas, the question arises as to why that plan has not been implemented in any substantial form for the last 33 years. It opens up various other questions as well, and in the absence of answers, protest is the only inevitable outcome.

There is a definite air of protest in the hills. That air is further darkened by an unmistakable melancholy. It is unrelenting in its capacity to expand a man's knowledge of misery. You have to be there to feel and experience it.

The cracks are not just on the walls and roads. It is everywhere, and mostly in the face of the common man. If a final breakdown were to take place, it would be a disaster for Manipur of a more sinister kind than any flood or famine or war or upheaval or riot or act it has ever witnessed.

It would be a confession of failure, of the inability to organize its vast masses into a common ground. It would be a failure not just of Government, but also of humanity.

While the crusading and the corrupt, the passionate and the tired, decide whether that final breakdown is to be allowed, the land meanwhile struggles to make something tolerable out of its sorry life. A Band-Aid here, a splint and plaster applied there.

The wretched body keeps lurching along, crippled, exhausted, and with suffocated breath. We can see it with our eyes shut, and we can see it now. Being blind, deaf, or dumb is no longer an alibi. We may just have crossed the safety barrier. Safety belts and harnesses are really quite pointless beyond this point.

Part of the problem is that we have a rather distanced view of what we call "progress". To put it mildly, progress and development have habitually been defined only in terms of local and ethnic expression, and after that, of setting it atop a pedestal where the heritage of one's ethnicity and culture is believed to be more important than the rest.

The object of agitation therefore becomes an abstraction, and the standard piecemeal reaction has been that of vandalism. Lesser numbers are being made less conscious of the value of something as obvious as a common lifeline.

There is a constant abuse of collective liberties, encapsulated in the phrase 'Bandh'. Irrespective of its legal or political authenticity, this capsule is being forced upon us with the claim that all remedies are contained in it, and therefore the capsule amounts to a total solution. As such, it allows everyone else to acknowledge the nastiness of our place, and also to regard it more with distaste than with concern.

The principal issue is not whether Sadar Hills should become a separate entity, empowered with its own affairs, or with projecting itself inward in sectarian interventions. Rather, it is whether a project of decentralization and economic construction common to the hills, to the ethnic-social sphere will be elaborated and will gain the recognition and approval of its nearest peripheral neighbors - a project that depends on them, but which has been unfairly anathematized and demonized as an exaggerated intrusion.

For "district" we should perhaps read "help", because there has been no attempt made yet to read the gravity of the situation. This is a matter of one of the largest hill populations rapidly approaching the point of breakdown in terms of its economy, unemployment, healthcare, education, transport, and other essentially humane features of life.

The obvious point is that there is no happy outcome from political sweeteners and first aid that have little use or application for alleviating suffering. There is only more of the same deeper madness. The same deeper, madder, sadder hills.