Sinking Ship or Haitian Quake : Nature of Manipur’s imbroglio
Amar Yumnam
The stories of two famous sinking of civilian liners are being remembered, explored and researched repeatedly by people concerned with human civilisation. One was the sinking of MS Lusitania on 7 May 1915. This Scottish built ocean liner was owned by the Cunard Line. A German U-Boat torpedoed her and she sank in eighteen minutes, 15 kilometres off the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland, killing 1,198 of the 1,959 people aboard. This invited global wrath on Germany, and induced the United States of America to join World War I. The controversy surrounding the sinking still continues, but we are not interested in it today.
The other famous sinking was that of RMS Titanic. This Irish built ship was the largest liner at the time of her construction. About midnight on 14 April 1912 and four days into the ship's maiden voyage, Titanic struck an iceberg. She sank two hours and forty minutes later, and in the early hours of 15 April 1912. The accident resulted in deaths of 1,517 of the 2,223 people on board. This made it one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in history.
The Contrast: The two incidents produced contrasting human behaviour and the significance of it is have recently been highlighted by Benno Torgler of Australia and a leading development economist, Bruno Frey, of Switzerland. There were not enough lifeboats in both the ships. The survivors of the Lusitania disaster were mostly youths of the ages of 16 to 35. The disaster took place so fast that there were not enough time for the friendship feelings and altruism to occur among the passengers of this liner. In the case of the Titanic, the incidence of the tragedy was higher among males, and the survivors were mostly women, children and those with a child. The sinking of the ship took long enough for certain kind of social norms to get established among the passengers.
In the light of this contrasting impact of two more or less historical disasters, we may also put the behaviour of people after the recent Haiti earthquake. Large scale lootings followed as the ration was running short and people were not visualising any sooner improvement in the situation.
In This Light: In the light of the above, we may conceptualise the prevailing situation in Manipur consequent upon long years of conflict situation and absolute militarisation of the administrative responses. While militarisation has been legally justified, collateral deaths have mostly been rationalised and normalised to routine lowly ex-gratia payments. Well my intention today is not to get into this debate, but endeavour to theorise on the responses of the people to the prevailing mess. We know for sure that the socio-economic situation is very much like a sinking ship, and it has been sinking for pretty long.
From the Titanic lesson we know that, if the disaster has long periods of happening, it leads to the emergence of feelings of friendship, brotherhood and altruism. We need to ponder if this is happening in the case of Manipur. Unfortunately the responses of the people in general and people in the administration seem to rather resemble the Lusitania disaster and the Haiti quake. There is large scale exodus of fit youths from the State, first mostly to gain education and ultimately to settle for jobs anywhere under the sun other than the homeland. For those remaining in the homeland, the post-quake behaviour in Haiti is largely visible. There is now a massive upswing of selfishness salient in the land, and in a way almost unseen in the history of the land. Besides, this almost violates the inherited community ethics of the people historically residents here.
Role of Leadership: While appreciating the contrasting behavioural lessons highlighted by Torgler and Frey, some scholars have also been hinting at the differing leadership the two ships might have experienced. Similarly, in the context of the exodus of fit people from the land, and the failure for a social norm for altruism to emerge, we naturally should be looking at the primary role the leadership of the land. Unfortunately, we encounter extreme failure on this front as well.
The extremes of selfish behaviour are salient among the people in the administration, and these are the very people who can effectively act on their wishes. We have so many offices, but there has not emerged an official behaviour. We have so many officers, but very few, if any, possess the behaviour expected of officers. We have so many security-guarded “important persons”, but none seems to possess the behavioural qualities worthy of providing security cover. We have so many VIPs, but none seems behaving so. A personal anecdote and a very recent one at that would be interesting here. It happened at the Tulihal Airport at Imphal. An aircraft was almost about to leave with most of the passengers having been boarded. The security check of the next flight was being started in a very hectic way. At that moment, some VIPs of our own land barged in for boarding the flight almost ready to depart, virtually disturbing and stopping the ongoing security check for the next flight for they were VIP passengers. Well, what the people of the land, VIPs in particular, need to realise is that democracy is much more than just elections. We need to cultivate the spirit of democracy in every aspect of our activities. Even if we sink, we would love to sink the Titanic way.