The Hindu Business Line : Manipur: `Jewel of the East' or `Wild East'?

JAWAHARLAL Nehru described it as the Jewel of the East, and truly, the tiny State of Manipur, with its salubrious climate, its green fields, its misty hills and its pollution-free sky, is among the most beautiful and scenic places in India.

And yet, the State remains one of the most underdeveloped and poorest in India; a place where jobs are very hard to come by, where drug addiction is rampant, and insurgency, all-pervasive.

If you wonder aloud what drives the economy of the place, you will be told that it is mainly agriculture in rural areas.

Nothing very surprising about it, as this would be the story in any rural part of India.

Paddy is the staple crop and other products grown are sugarcane, maize, ginger, potatoes and other seasonal fruits and vegetables.

Looking at the bounty of the weather gods, and the greenery all around, you would obviously think that water should not be a problem in this region. But you would be wrong.

"For good and sustained agricultural production, you need good water supply. The only water supply we have is from the sky, and if it comes in excess, as it does during the monsoon, there are no storage or irrigation facilities. We have a beautiful lake, hardly 45 km from Imphal... the Logtak lake, which is 10 by 14 km in expanse and could be developed to attract tourists.

But nobody seems to be interested in doing that. The proudest possession of the National Keibul Lamjao wild life sanctuary is the Manipur or the Brow Antler deer, which is almost extinct in the wild.

"It is the only such specimen available in this part of the world and is taken from here to European countries such as Switzerland. But its numbers here are shrinking due to poaching," says Dr Lisam.

Apart from Government jobs and agriculture, or even better than both, is the money collected through extortion by the insurgents. There are as many as 29 different groups and tribes in Manipur, with the most prominent being the Meiteis, the Kukis and the Hmars, with each having its own sub- groups too, to thoroughly confuse an outsider.

Contesting Nehru's description of Manipur as the `Jewel of the East' is the title `Wild East'.

The insurgents run a parallel regime and have to be paid their taxes.

Different groups have their own networks and organisations and their tax collective mechanism is much more efficient and stringent than the Government of India's.

Anything between 10 to 20 per cent of one's income has to be paid to the insurgent group to which you owe allegiance.

An outsider might call it extortion, but the people who cough up the money call it protection money. Incredible though it might sound, proper receipts are issued by the "defence councils" of the various insurgent groups for the money paid.

"The bulk of the money is collected by the insurgents from Government servants; for one thing, they at least have a job and regular income, not to mention the money made through corruption by many of them.

"And people here would rather pay the insurgents than pay income-tax; saying at least we are paying up to our own people," says a shop keeper in Imphal who has been regularly contributing to the "defence council" of a prominent insurgent group.

Insurgency in Manipur has a long and complex history and is a result of a sense of discrimination among the Meitis of Imphal valley vis-à-vis the Nagas of the hill districts. Over the years, New Delhi has given many concessions to the Naga rebels, at the cost of the Meitis, to buy peace with the militant Nagas.

These include measures such as barring purchase of land in the hill areas, whereas the tribals in the hills could acquire land in the valley.

According to a political analyst, for long years, the hill tribes enjoyed far greater educational and job reservations "which have made them administrative overlords in Manipur."

Later, of course, this anomaly was corrected in the Mandal recommendations, but he feels the damage had been done in deeply polarising the different groups in the region.

In the middle of June 2001, Manipur went up in flames. The immediate provocation was the agreement signed by the Central Government with the National Socialist Council of Nagaland (Issac-Muivah) to extend the cease-fire by another year without territorial restrictions.

This outraged the Manipuris, and in the riots which followed, over a dozen protestors were killed in the police firing.

The violence had its genesis in the 1994 Nagaland Assembly resolution seeking integration of the Naga-inhabited areas of Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh into a Greater Nagaland. The Manipuris feared that their State would once again be divided, and naturally enough protested.

In an article published on the Web publication `The Hoot', Mr Pradip Phanjoubam, Editor of the Imphal Free Press, explained how shoddy governance over the years had only strengthened the sway the insurgents had over the general population.

"A situation now exists in which the legitimate Government establishment has lost the confidence of the people. Years of misgovernance, rampant corruption, inefficiency, open and blatant show of betrayals amongst those in power, disregard of merit in the award of Government jobs, etc., have eroded the moral authority of the Government, resulting in the emergence of other power centres."

He adds that by filling up the vacuum in governance, despite the several undesirable acts of the insurgents, they had "emerged as the mailed fists of an oppressed people to deliver their anger and frustration at the sick, corrupt and decaying establishment".

On August 3, the Sangai Express of Manipur reported that the much hyped and keenly awaited 1000 km road project of the World Bank, costing Rs 434 crore had been dropped. The newspaper said this was due to the administration's failure to submit a detailed project report within the stipulated time.

"The World Bank had sanctioned a sum of Rs 10 crore to survey the topography and draw up the project, but the submission of the project report was delayed due to a number of factors such as bandhs, curfew and the law and order situation prevailing in the State."

In yet another development, the Central Government had turned down the proposal of the Manipur Government to extend the super highway corridor from Silchar to Moreh. "Under this scheme, called the East-West Corridor, a Super Express Highway is envisaged, which will run from Kashmir in the North to Kanya Kumari in the South and from Saurashtra in the West to Silchar in the East," added the report.

To realise what this kind of news means to a place like Manipur, one does not need to go too far out of Imphal to experience the shock waves that run down your back as you negotiate what can at best be described as an atrocious apology for a road.

Invited to attend an HIV/AIDS awareness camp, held for the first time in a Muslim village -Lilong Horebi - hardly 10 km outside Imphal, one went through a nightmarish journey.

First, there was the question of getting the right directions.

The road is virtually non-existent, and the huge potholes eat into it in several places; it is by sheer miracle, you are forced to think, that your vehicle manages to stay on track. After several missed turns, we make it to the village, with the travel taking over an hour and a half for a distance of 10 km!

The people are simple and friendly enough, but the warmth that you find in many places in India, is missing. You are an outsider, and have to be treated with a certain degree of diffidence, if not resentment.

Hotel Nirmala, where I stayed, is the best in Imphal, I am told by several people. And yet, it has no lobby on the ground floor, as you would find in any decent hotel. But you cannot really find fault with it for operating out of levels other than the ground floor, where several offices are located.

But you certainly want to scream when you try to make a call from your room and cannot get the dial tone. The explanation is simple enough.

"We have only one line, and while another guest is on the telephone, you can't use the line," explains the person manning the reception in a matter-of-fact voice.

And you cannot use your mobile in Imphal either because the cellular phone service has not yet reached Manipur. As in Srinagar, the overtly and covertly active insurgent groups have assured that the Government fights shy of making such a facility available here.

"Oh no, we have no mobile phone. Yes, we do have the Internet, and there are cyber cafes here, but most of the time the server is down and to get connected to your Hotmail account can prove to be both a frustrating as well as a traumatic experience," says Mr Bunta Singh from the Manipur Network of Positive People.

How strong or extensive is the feeling of alienation among the Manipuris, you wonder, because you do not sense the kind of hostility you find in Kashmir, or mistrust you find in Nagaland. But then you do not find much warmth from the people either.

"Yes, there is a feeling of alienation here; very much so. For one thing, there is so much of unemployment and no industries have come up to make a difference to the economy or the job scene. We find that the rate at which development is taking place in states like Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Delhi or Gujarat... we don't find even one tenth of that here. So we can't help feeling that to the rest of India the North-East is a totally different entity, and not an important one at that," he adds, giving you a lot of food for thought.

(To be continued)

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