Seeking Constitutional protection : Taking other small States
- The Sangai Express Editorial :: January 21, 2013 -

Extracting assurance.

This is what successive Governments of Manipur have been doing ever since the ceasefire agreement between Delhi and the NSCN (IM) was inked way back on August 1, 1997.

Integrity rallies, integrity meetings, the June 18 Uprising of 2001 are all indications of how seriously the threat perception to the territorial integrity of Manipur has been taken in the backdrop of the Greater Lim demand raised by the NSCN (IM) in its political negotiations with the Government of India.

More than ten years down the line since the June 18 Uprising of 2001 and apart from rolling back the 'ceasefire without territorial limits' clause, Delhi has only been falling back on the verbal assurances that the territorial integrity of Manipur would not be compromised at any cost.

Perhaps the only significant political statement ever made by a leader from Delhi on the territorial sanctity of Manipur came from the then Prime Minister of India, Atal Behari Vajpayee when he observed that the consensus of the neighbouring States are needed to resolve the Indo-Naga issue. That this statement was delivered at Kohima when Vajpayee was the Prime Minister made it all that more significant.

Fast forward some years and nothing has moved since then, with Delhi banking on issuing one verbal assurance after the other.

That the apprehension over the territorial integrity of Manipur still hangs heavy in the air is perhaps best exemplified by the latest visit of an all political party delegates to Delhi to exert pressure on the Prime Minister that nothing would be done to compromise with the boundary of the State.

That the verbal assurances have not been able to inspire the confidence that it merits is best borne out by the fact that Chief Minister O Ibobi, while leading the delegates, urged the Prime Minister to effect an amendment to Article 3 of the Constitution of India to make it non-applicable to Manipur. Seeking Constitutional protection is perhaps the best option left before Manipur.

However as pointed out by the Association of Premier State College Seniors in the media in 2010, what Manipur needs to do is to reach out to other small sized States like Tripura, Goa and Sikkim and strike a united front.

If Manipur cannot do it alone, then why not reach out to other small States and come under a common stand ? Delhi would be that much more pressured to look into the matter with the urgency it requires.

Unfortunately this line of thought does not seem to have hit the political leadership of Manipur. If the then Union Home Minister P Chidambaram could say that the Statehood demand raised by the Eastern Naga Peoples' Organisation was infeasible, taking the geographical size of Nagaland into consideration, then what is stopping the Centre from saying that bifurcation of Manipur would not be feasible along this same argument ?

Reorganisation of States under Article 3 of the Constitution with respect to larger States like Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar may be feasible but if the provisions under the same Article is applied to small States like Manipur, Tripura, Sikkim and Goa, then it would not be re-organisation but 'disorganisation,' as the APSCS pointed out.