DM Monitoring
New Delhi: It is high time we started asking about the complicity of the Union government in the ongoing violence which has devastated Manipur. And hold the prime minister responsible for it. It needs to be said that by remaining proactively ‘inactive’ in Manipur, it has succeeded in creating a long lasting, if not permanent division in the entire North Eastern region. It is no mean achievement for a party which rules by creating more and more division and chaos in the country.
It is inconceivable that the Modi government, which has the ability to silence all voices in Jammu and Kashmir, which proactively intervenes through its agencies in West Bengal or other states, has not been able to stop the violence in Manipur despite saying it wants to.
Our commentariat and the opposition too has been treating the silence of the Union government as an act of callous indifference on its part. The blame is being put on Biren Singh and rightly so. But how do we explain the failure of a Union government headed by a man who keeps asking the people across India to give power to the BJP in the states too so that he can directly control their affairs at the state-level too?
Can the Narendra Modi government say that it has not been able to contain the violence in Manipur despite the presence of an unprecedented number of central security forces and the extraordinary power that it has assumed by sending its special representative to ‘help’ the state government?
Is it failure, or unwillingness to stop the violence?
It has been said by veteran police officers and civil servants that if violence, especially communal violence, continues for more than 24 hours, it means the authorities do not want it to stop and are very much part of it. Imagine a whole state engulfed by sectarian violence for nearly three months! It was evident from day one that the state government was not too keen to stop the bloodshed. A government which justifies all its actions in the name of internal security, which has taken the control of the security of large areas of states which border other countries, allows a border state like Manipur to burn for three months.
There must be a design behind this purported helplessness.
Before we talk about it, we must also first describe the nature of the violence. Now all observers agree that Meitei majoritarian groups actively aided by the state police, have taken over the valley. There is no hiding the fact that the chief minister himself is the patron of these groups. Their leaders have openly expressed their intent to exterminate the Kuki population. No action has been taken against them. Are we to believe that the decision to let them roam free is Biren Singhs alone? That the Modi government and its special representative sitting in Manipur cannot do anything to get the CM to reign these extremists in?
Could it be that the Modi government in New Delhi, like the state government in Imphal, is not interested in ending this majoritarian violence? That it wants this violence to run its course to achieve a definite purpose: of creating permanent division in Manipur so that it can better control the state and its resources by fragmenting it?
As the crisis drags on, we are seeing Manipur violence casting its malevolent shadows beyond the state’s borders. The attack on Kukis had already created disquiet in Mizoram. Now we see threats being issued to Meiteis in Mizoram. The first and immediate response of the Manipur CM is to announce special plane services to evacuate Meiteis. Neither the state, nor the Union government feel the need to take steps to halt the violence and insecurity. After that, Meitei groups have issued threats to the Mizos living in the Barak valley of Assam. The Nagas, who had earlier said that they should be left alone, are restless. In Meghalaya, in the very initial days of violence, local groups had said that people displaced from Manipur should not be given hospitality in the state.
The demand for a National Register of Citizens (NRC) is being made by the Meiteis and it would definitely find an echo in other regions as all ‘natives’ and ‘indigenous’ people would want to secure their lands from ‘outsiders’.
The whole region, which was getting stable after decades of conflicts, has now been destabilised. It does not need great imagination to conclude that dormant militant factions will seek to regroup and rearm themselves with the support of their communities as they do not trust the state governments anymore.
How ironic it is to see the demand for the imposition of the Armed Forces Social Powers Act( AFSPA) by a section of the Manipuris, the very people who had been opposing it tooth and nail for the last several decades.
It is dangerously naive to think that all this is happening without the involvement of the Modi government. Any government which cares for the nation would do everything to restore peace and order in the country and society. But the record of the Modi government is one of creating chaos.
Chaos, uncertainty and instability are very helpful for authoritarian governments because they create confusion in the minds of the people.
They fail to make sense of the world around them and are numbed into silence. We have seen the Modi government destabilising the lives of the people through demonetisation, GST and the sudden lockdown. During the the second COVID-19 wave, we saw it controlling the supply of oxygen, making people run around in desperation and then entering the scene when chaos had run its course.
The instability and violence in Manipur is also good for the Modi government as it can go to voters in the “Hindi Belt” with a threat and a promise. The threat is of ‘outsiders’ taking over the North East region and the promise is of controlling them. The figure of the ‘outsider’ is what the Modi-led BJP wants to keep alive to scare the electorate into voting for it for their security.
It is not the silence of the PM but his refusal to end the violence in Manipur which is proof of his complicity it it. One needs to note that in the first remarks on the crisis that he made in 78 days, he chose not to speak a word about Manipur itself but only about the incident related to the viral video. Taking a cue from him, top ministers and TV anchors have now made ‘violence against women’ the issue and not the orchestrated violence in Manipur of which the horrific attack on women seen in that video is a product.
All this leads us to only one conclusion: that the Modi government is not at all bothered by the violence in Manipur. Its silence and inaction is a sign that the ongoing chaos is advantageous to the BJP. Who cares if India is cut to pieces and devoured by this majoritarian politics?
