Vulnerable Manipur's Cultural Warming
- A British legacy -
- Part 1 -

By Dr DS Sharma *

Particularly vulnerable Manipur was the crisp but meaningful reference, Thursday, of prime minister Dr Manmohan Singh during Chief Ministers' Conference on Internal Security at New Delhi.

Touching on a whole gamut of issues concerning the internal security of the country, Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh said that the problems of North East States and Jammu/Kashmir are unique ...the situation is vulnerable in Manipur and Nagaland.
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Addressing the Chief Ministers' Conference on internal security at New Delhi , the Prime Minister said ....that these regions suffer from poor infrastructure and communication facilities. "It has been our sincere attempt to improve these facilities so that these States too can benefit from our booming economy," said the Prime Minister.
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However these States have vulnerabilities on the internal security front which needs to be discussed, said Dr Singh and added, "each Sate has its specific nuances and characteristics and we cannot generalise the problems.
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But it's certainly not the first occasion that these words have been used for the same Manipur, sort of.

A British legacy:

For, British ethnographers, Thompson & Garrat, used the same word vulnerable while referring to NE Region, and virtually lamented that, 'except ... the vulnerable northeast...', Britain could leave 'a permanent mark upon Indian life'.

Discernably enough, till date, everything else in the former Indian colony has 'since been forthcoming', quoting selfsame historians' post-modernistic or ex ante view, with the caustic exception of North East region. The prime minister too laments that so far North east has not been able to share in the benefit from our booming economy.

The question was why.

Why – despite various Central efforts – couldn't any sane man kick-start in vocations and become viable, as in mainland?
Is it because Delhi has failed to convince and rev-up NE Indians?
Or else, are they acting more like unwilling horses led to the trough?

One thing is however certain. The polity-formation (NE Reorganization Act) came two and half decades late; and that too not unasked for and/or unagitated.

Then came serial political instability and culturally complex conflicts (cultural warming) depriving the region of its fair share in growth all these years – along with all those lagged prospects from joining in the bandwagon of a miraculous Asian economic boom under the still hazy Look East Policy.

On reckoning, it is still unclear if North East has even now become congenial enough for a final polity delineation so that all such polities can render effective administration and, among others, deliver welfare stance and provide infrastructural needs for onward development of individual self (the economic man) and his appurtenance.

Perhaps the colonial vestige (Exclusion, Partial Exclusion and Non-interference) could not have been fully unshackled even during the last six decades.

For that matter, even the famously sneering Britishness character couldn't go scot-free for having embedded in the region the seed of a Christian empire, as since unfolding.

It sounds safest from the analytical standpoint to adopt the occidental standpoint (keeping the global netizen viewpoint) and presume the fundamental difference of an average north east homo sapien from his mainland counterpart in terms of a basic immaturity, where:
'Immaturity is defined as inability to use one's own understanding without the guidance of another.

This immaturity is self-incurred if its cause is not lack of understanding but lack of resolution and courage to use it without the guidance of another', following Immanuel Kant: An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?: Lawrence Cahoone (Ed.) From Modernism to Post-Modernism: An Anthology: Cambridge: 1996: p. 51).

To be continued...

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* Dr DS Sharma wrote this article for The Sangai Express. This article was webcasted on May 28, 2008.

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