KCP Wants to Know What’s On Your Mind

One of my neighbours in Sagolband, he is a man of letter. A long time ago, he had written a dissertation on Emily Dickinson, he told me, but nowadays he is consumed in the dull prosaic and pragmatics of life. He has become so practical that he believes the condemned lives of the Manipuris have a hope if we are made to categorise under the constitutional hierarchy, particularly of the scheduled tribes, which India has constructed generously to uplift the underprivileged groups. 

After all his plagiarised dissertation and receiving the doctorate degree, today, my neighbour talks about fresh and original worldviews that would help all of us. That is, if you have a grievance, you stand to win favourably if you are officially made a certain group of people regardless of any historical, cultural or civilisational narratives. I can understand his stand for two reasons. First, he is a government employee; and second, because as one of the respected filmmakers wailed in front of me recently, you have to be in the system. What’s more, leave alone finding an alternative approach, even mere consideration of such approach is an act of craziness.

Well, today’s issue is not about Emily Dickinson or the Manipuri film industry. This is a deliberation over the ongoing crises of the demand for enforcing Inner Line Permit System and including the Meiteis in the category of scheduled tribes. The argument and counterargument on the issue have reached a new high with reference to the level of Manipur’s ability to play out farce and tragedy simultaneously. As if this was insufficient the proscribed Kangleipak Communist Party has added a new perspective through one of its press releases forwarded to local media organisations a couple of days ago.

The gist of the statement was that the Kangleipak Communist Party (KCP) will strive to fight against the present establishment that endorses neocolonialism, which is together with the bad old ‘colonialism’ are referred to as loilamleingaak in local parlance.

However, in the ongoing crisis over the issues of the ILP System and ST demand, the proscribed organisation is interested in listening to the voices of the people regarding these matters. The statement is contradictory because you either support these issues or you oppose them. Why, because, both the issues lie strictly inside the domain of the establishment. Any endorsement of these campaigns brings out the ideological hollowness of the purported supporters, especially if the people belong to the other side of the law.

When even those people who are ‘outside’ the establishment are willing to flow with the tide because it is ‘practical’, let me put it this way: our collective life is a sham. No wonder then we have no consensus on having this constitutional mechanism of protecting indigenous societies or whatever stuffs that affect our collective life. We live in a land where our own constitution was flouted in 1949 so blatantly to impose on us an alien structure of administration and governance. Apparently any opposition has become a sort of dinosaur-stuffs—long gone and extinct—and what is supposedly significant nowadays is just to flow with the tide.

As a side note, do you remember the Corcom’s decision to ban the Congress party in the last general election? They are minding nothing but everybody’s businesses within the establishment. I’d say all the insurgents in our backyard have become a true nationalist: Indian nationalists, to be precise, who believe in MK Gandhi’s wisdom of being the change that they wish to see in this world.

As far as the ILP System and ST demands are concerned, the onus is on the natives. Becoming a ST, for certain, does not imply that the rising ethnic hostility will be minimised; neither it promises that NSCN-IM will go away silently/abruptly to Kohima or Dimapur; or for that matter, it does not imply growth or development. There are several paradigms of development but none of them says that freebies and privileges of a certain government can help in it.

Finally, I don’t stand for any offer of privileges from the highly inefficient and incompetent establishment. I also don’t believe in anything good out of our collective condemned lives. The best that we have been doing together is destroying houses as the part of a mob or participating in street protests as a sort of an annual affair. I believe if there is political will, if there is political consciousness, we can check the demographic issues constructively without a colonial law or regulation. But apparently we have a habit for taking permission for everything because we are a slave society.