The last nails in the coffin

N. Arunkumar *

Bomb Blast at Sangakpham market, Imphal :: 01 August 2011

"Time is free, but it's priceless. You can't
own it, but you can use it. You can't keep
it, but you can spend it. Once you've lost it
you can never get it back."
Harvey MacKay quotes

The bomb went off as designed, and in a few exceptionally brief moments of its havoc, five lives were strewn on the street, embracing the devil of evil with the crushing disgust of premature death. The perpetrators must have smiled in glee at their deed, and congratulated themselves at the amount of damage, destruction and death they had engraved in their wicked objectives.

If this is a part of any revolution, then we are dancing the dance of death with the devil. Those lives that were lost might seem unimportant to the gang, group or individuals who planted the bomb there, to go off at a destined moment of insanity. It did go off, and another chapter was written in our daily dose of close encounters with the ides of horror. The sight of dead bodies scattered around in various degrading postures have stunned our sensibilities again, and yet we continue to tolerate and generate hatred, and heap humiliations at ourselves in this manner.

When Mumbai was attacked in a similar fashion a few days ago, there was national condemnation at the audacity of the attacks, and investigations were undertaken on a full scale war footing, instantly thereafter. But, here in our little village called Imphal, there won't be anything of the sort and the investigations will not have the National Corps descending down on our city to find out the truth or the culprits. The culprits are after all, a group who are fighting for something they claim are legitimate rights, and have all the ears of the Central government now.

Hence, we are left to fend for ourselves and live with this indignity, resigning ourselves to expect more such vicious attacks and gory deaths in the times to come. We are fighting ourselves actually, and there should be no doubts about this. We are killing our own, and there should be no doubts about this either. We have let loose the cat among the pigeons, and blame none but ourselves in our scheme of revolution and battle. The battle with the Indian Army in Kashmir or Punjab and Mumbai will make it to the headlines, as the enemy is more than obvious there. But, here in our land, the balance of equations is heaped against our own.

The Let or the IM along with the ISI is not a reality for us. We are our own enemies. The allegations and speculations will be rife among us as to who could have done this dastardly act against our own. But, the answers though obvious will not be spoken out loud or condemned by us as the counterattack for doing so could be more than what we would ask for.

So, silence and mute resignation is the order of the day, while we continue to wallow in our miserable encounters with the colour of scarlet. In the meantime, the peace process between the Indian government and the NSCN (IM) continues to be on course, with sans respect for the feelings of the people of Manipur who are being slaughtered and smothered under the boots by the same people who are smoking the peace pipe with the vendors of death and destruction.

If at all anybody had a problem with the SDO office or whatever, for which reason this blast is being justified, the question is, was there no diplomatic means to whip up a solution to the protest? What prompted such a drastic step as to kill innocent people to draw the attention of the authorities to their disgust to something that the innocent people walking the streets are not a part of? Is this a civilized way of expressing anybody's fair grievances?

I strongly condemn it if anyone considers that it is a civilized manner of solving social issues. Look at the gravity of the destruction caused by this madness now. Children dead, bread winners of a family wiped out, property destroyed, people stirred to passionate anger, and the scars left behind on the street at the sight of the bomb blast will not be washed away by the torrential rains either.

The scarlet scars of the blood stains will remain for a long time to come, at least in the age of this epoch. The residents of the region will not forget, and will keep the memories of this dastardly act alive for a long time. Their wounds are deep and will not heal quickly. However, Manipur has been witness to so many such scenes of madness over the years, and we are even running out of newsprint stock to document all of these exhaustively, in our pages.

Stories of disagreements, deaths, kidnappings, extortions, social unrest, complete breakdown of law and order etc are a staple of our daily life now. All of us are uneasy today, as we know that we have no hope of achieving anything significantly different for ourselves even in terms of lives and limbs, since we have no administration or government who is bothered about our plight. The law enforcement agencies are now walking roughshod over us, as though we are in the midst of a tornado orchestrated by them.

Imagine; when we have a government that praises itself for repairing a road or laying a new road of a few hundred metres and claims of achieving social progress, we are doomed.

A road is certainly a necessity, but is it built at the right place? Is it contributing in mitigating the misery of a village or a community? Are such noble steps being taken up to connect the remote forsaken villages of the state, in order to bring them within the ambit of economic growth? Are the remote areas of the state the fiefdoms of various tribal chiefs and units? Are they not a part of the state as a collective whole?

Why are we silently suffering the inequalities in our priorities as though these can just be brushed under the carpet and, then continue to pretend with artificial smiles on our faces, claiming that we are progressing and catching up with the rest of the country. We have so many pressing issues, which need urgent attention and remedies, but the government seems to be loitering in the dark as they have no solutions to these problems, other than signing MOU's with JAC's of all hues and shapes.

The juggernaut of devastation is hurtling down a dark road of no return, and the road is not even on a level plain but going down a deep gorge, leading to a deeper chasm, which cannot be filled up unexpectedly. All the respectable chiefs, leaders, every other social thinker and pressure groups of the state have a great pioneering role to play in awakening the people to the realities of their situations, in a sensible and responsible manner, so as to include them within the ambit of collective progress, rather than focus on prejudiced problems for mere myopic solutions. The task at hand is huge, and we have to wake up soon or else our slumber will lead us to our total failure as a mature society to solve our own problems.

Our solutions are with us only, and not with far away Delhi, folks. The sooner we understand this, the better it will be for us. We have to answer to our future generations, if at all we have to earn their respect and admiration. And if we continue to slaughter and blame each other with impunity on every petty issue, we shall shove our age deeper into a tangle of doubts, suspicions and distrust, which will be nothing short of the last nails in the coffins of our time honoured traditional bonds. None of us want that.

None of us! The patience of the people of the state should not be read as a weakness of any sort, either.